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A HISTOEY 



OF 



EOMAN LITEEATUEE, 



n 



\ 



A HISTORY OF 



EOMAN LITEEATUEE: 



FROM 



^ ^KxluBi leriob 



CHARLES THOMAS CRUTTWELL, M.A. 

FELLOW AND TUIOB OF IklBBTON COLLEGB, OXFORD. 



BY 



WITH 




TO. FOR THE 



YORK: 
CHARLES SCRIB'nER'S SONS, 

SUCCESSORS TO 

SCBIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO. 

[All rights reserved.] . 



^^<4 



tK 






%fHAi0iyr 



TO 

THE YENEEABLE J. A. HESSEY, D.O.L. 

ARCHDEACON OF MIDDLESEX^ 

This Work 

IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED 
BY HIS FORMER PUPIL, 

THE AUTHOR, 



PEE FACE. 



The present work is designed mainly for Students at our 
Universities and Public Schools, and for such, as are preparing 
for the Indian Civil Service or other advanced Examinations. 
The author hopes, however, that it may also be acceptable to 
some of those who, without being professed scholars, are yet 
interested in the grand literature of Eome, or who wish to refresh 
their memory on a subject that perhaps engrossed their early 
attention, but which the many calls of advancing life have made 
it difficult to pursue. 

All who intend to undertake a thorough study of the subject 
will turn to Teuffel's admirable History, without which many 
chapters in the present work could not have attained complete- 
ness ; but the rigid severity of that exhaustive treatise makes it 
fitter for a book of reference for scholars than for general read- 
ing even among students. The author, therefore, trusts he may 
be pardoned for approaching the History of Roman Literature 
from a more purely literary point of view, though at the same 
time without sacrificing those minute and accurate details 
without which criticism loses half its value. The continual 
references to Teuffel's work, excellently translated by Dr. W. 
Wagner, will bear sufficient testimony to the estimation in which 



Vin PEEFACE. 

the author holds it, and the obligations which he here desires to 
acknowledge. 

He also begs to express his thanks to Mr. John Wordsworth, 
of B. N. C, Oxford, for many kind suggestions, as well as for 
courteous permission to make use of his Fragments and Specie 
mens of Early Latin ; to ]\ir. H. A. Eedpath, of Queen's College, 
Oxford, for much valuable assistance in correction of the proofs, 
preparation of the index, and collation of references, and to his 
brother, Mr W. H. G. Cruttwell, for verifying citations from the 
post- Augustan poets. 

To enumerate all the sources to which the present Manual is 
indebted would occupy too much space here, but a few of the 
more important may be mentioned. Among German writers, 
Bernhardy and Eitter — among French, Boissier, Champagny, 
Diderot, and Nisard — have been chiefly used. Among English 
scholars, the works of Dunlop, Conington, Ellis, and Munro, 
have been consulted, and also the History of Roman Literature, 
reprinted from ^Q__Encyclop(jedia Metropolitana, a work to which 
frequent reference is made, and which, in fact, suggested the 
preparation of the present volume. 

It is hoped that the Chronological Tables, as well as the list of 
Editions recommended for use, and the Series of Test-Questions 
appended, will materially assist the Student. 

Oxford, 

November, 1877. 



CONTENTS. 



INTEODUCTIOIT. 

PAGE 

Eoman and Greek Literature have their periods of study — Influence of 
each — Exactness of Latia language — Greek origin of Latin litera- 
ture — Its three great periods: (1) The Ante-Classical Period; 
(2) The Golden Age ; (3) The Decline, . . . .1 



B K I. 

FKOM LIVIXJS ANDRONICUS TO STJLLA (240-80 B.O.), 

Chapter I. 

On the Earliest Remains of the Latin Language. 

Early inhabitants of Italy — Italic dialects — Latin — Latin alphabet — 
Later innovations — Pronunciation — Spelling — Early Monuments — 
Song of Eratres Arvales — Salian Hymn — Law of Eomulus — Laws 
of Twelve Tables — Treaty between Rome and Carthage — Columna 
Rostrata — Epitaphs of the Scij)ios — Senatus ConsuUum de Bac- 
chanalibus — Break-up of the language, . , , .9 

Appendix. — Examples of late corrupted dialects, • • ,21 

Chapter II. 

On the Beginnings of Roman Literature. 

The Latin character — Romans a practical people — Their religion nn- 
romantic — Primitive culture of Latium — Germs of drama and epos 
— No early historians — Early speeches — Ballad literature — No early 
Roman epos — Poets despised — Fescenninae — Saturae — Mirrte or 
Planipes — Atellanae — Saturnian metre — Early interest in politics 
and law as giving the germs of oratory and jurisprudence, , 23 



X CONTENTS. 

Chapter III. page 

The Introduction of Greece Literature — Livius and Naevius (240-204 B.C.). 

Introduction of Greek literature to Rome — Its first translators — Livius 
Andronicus — His translation of the Odyssey, Tragedies, &c. — On. 
Naevius — Inventor of Praetextae — Style — A politician — Writer of 
the first national epic poem — His exile and death — Cicero's opinion 
of him — His epitaph, , , . , , ,36 

Chapter IV. 

Roman Comedy — Plautus to Turpilius (254-103 B.C.). 

The Roman theatre — Plan of construction — Comedy — Related to 
Athenian Middle and New Comedy — Plautus — His plays — Their 
plots and style — Palliatae and Togatae — His metres — Caecilius — 
Admires Terence — Terence — His intimate friends — His style — Use 
of contamination — Lesser comedians, , , . .41 

Chapter V. 

Eoman Tragedy : Ennius — Aecius (233-94 B.C.). 

Contrast between Greek and Roman tragedy — Oratorical form of Latin 
tragedy — Ennius — The father of Roman poetry — His humanitas — 
Relations with Scipio — A follower of Pythagoras — His tragedies 
— Pacuvius — Painter and tragedian — Cicero's criticism oihisNiptra 
— His epitaph — L. Aecius — The last tragic writer — A reformer of 
spelling, ........ 56 

Appendix. — On some fragments of Sueius or Suevius, • ,67 

Chapter VI. 
Epic Poetry : Ennius — Furius (200-100 B.C.). 

Naevius and Ennius — Olympic deities and heroes of Roman story — 
Hexameter of Ennius — Its treatment — Matius — Hostius — Furius, 68 

Chapter VII. 

The Early History of Satire : Ennius to Lucilius (200-103 B.C.). 

Koman satire a native growth — Origin of word ^* Saturae" — It is 
didactic — Not necessarily poetical in form — Ennius — Pacuvius — 
Lucilius — The objects of his attack — His popularity — His humility 
— ^His style and language, . . . . . .75 

Chapter VIII. 

The Minor Departments of Poetry — The Atellanae (Pomponius and 

Novius, circ. 90 b .c. ) and the Epigram {Ennius — 

Catulus, 100 B.C.). 

Atellanae — Oscan in origin — Novius — Pomponius — Mummius — Epi- 
grammatists— Catulus — Porcius Licjinius—Pompilius— Valerius 
Aed.tuus, • •• .,^.» • .82 



CONTEOTS. xf 

Chapter IX. page 

Prose LUeratwre — History. Fabiiis Pidor — Macer (210-80 B.C.). 

Early records — Annates, Libri Lintei, Commentarii, &c. — Narrow view 
of history — Fabius — Cincius Alimentus — Cato — Creator of Latin 
prose — His orations— His Origines — His treatise on agriculture — 
His miscellaneous writings — Catonis dicta — Calpurnius Piso — Sem- 
pronius Asellio — Claudius Quadrigarius Valerius Antias — Licinius 
Macer, , . . . , , , .87 

Appendix.— On the .^wwaZe^Pow^t/Jcwm, . • . .103 

Chapter X. 

The History of Oratory lefore Cicero. 
Comparison of English, Greek, and Roman oratory — Appius — Cor- 
nelius Cethegus — Cato — Laelius — The younger Scipio — Galba — 
Carbo — The Gracchi — Self-praise of ancient orators — Aemilius 
Scaurus — Eutilius — Catulus — A violent death often the fate of a 
Roman orator — M, Antonius — Crassus — The Roman law-courta 
— Bribery and corruption prevalent in them — Feelings and pre- 
judices appealed to — Cotta and Sulpicius — Carbo the younger — 
Hortensius— his friendship for Cicero — Asiatic and Attic styles, 105 

Chapter XI. 

Other hinds of Prose Literature : Grammar, Rhetoric, and Philosophy 

(147-63 B.C.). 

Legal writers— P. Macius Scaevela— Q. Mucins Scaevola— Rhetoric — 

Plotius Gallus — Cornificius — Grammatical science — Aelius Stilo — 

Philosophy — Amafinius — Eabirius-^Relation of philosophy to 

religion, ...,.,. .^129 



BOOK II. 
THE GOLDEK AGE. 
From the Consulship of Cicero to the Death of Augxtstus 

(63 B.C. -14 A.D.). 



PART I. 
THE REPUBLICAN PERIOD, 

Jhapter I. 

Varro. 

The two Divisions of this culminating period — Classical authors — Yarro 

— His life, his character, his encyclopaedic mind — His Menippcan 

Satires — Logistorici — Antiquities Divine and Hmnan — Imagines — 

De Lingua Latina — De Re Rustica, , . . . 1 41 



XU CONTENTS. 

Chapter I. {Continued). page 

Appendix.— ISTote I. The Menippean Satires of Varro, . .156 

„ II. The Logistorici, , , . .156 

,, III. Fragments of Atacinus, . . . 157 

„ IV. The Jurists, Critics, and Grammarians of less 

note, , , . , , . 157 

Chapter II. " 
Oratory and Philosophy — Cicero (106-43 B.C.). 

Cicero — His life — Pro Roscio — In Verrem — Pro Cluentio — Pro lege 
Manilla — Pro UaMrio — Cicero and Clodius — His exile — ProMilone 
— His Philippics — Criticism of his oratory — Analysis of Pro Milone 
— His Philosophy, moral and political — On the existence of God 
and the human soul — List of his philosophical works — His rhetori- 
cal works — His letters — His contemporaries and successors, , 159 

•Appendix.— Poetry of M. and Q. Cicero, . . , , 186 

Chapter III. 
Historical and Biographical Composition — Caesar — Nepos — Sallust. 

Roman view of history — Caesar's Commentaries — Trustworthiness of his 
statements — His style — A. Hirtius — Other writers of commentaries 
— Csesar's oratorical and scientific position — Cornelius Nepos — 
C. Sallustius Crispus — Tubero, ..... 187 

■Appendix — On the Acta Diicrna smd Acta Senatus, . . .206 

Chapter IV. 

7%e History of Poetry to the Close of the Repuhlic — Rise of Alexandrinism 
— Lucretius — Catullus. 

The Drama — J. Caesar Strabo — The Mimae — D. Laberius — Publilius 
Syrus — Matins — Pantomimi — Actors — The poetry of Cicero and 
Caesar — Alexandria and its writers — Aratus — Callimachus — Apol- 
loniusRhodius — Euphorion — Lucretius — His philosophical opinions 
and style — Bibacnlus — Varro Atacinus — Calvus — Catullus — Lesbia, 208 
Appendix. — Note I. On the Use of Alliteration in Latin Poetry, . 238 
II. Some additional details on the History of the 

Mimus, . . . . . . 239 

III. Fragments of Valerius Soranus, . , 240 



PART IL 
THE A UGVSTAN EPOCH (42 B.C. -14 a.d.). 

Chapter I. 

General Characteristics. 

Common features of the Augustan authors — Augustus's relation to them 
— Maecenas — The Apotheosis of the emperor — Rhetoricians not 
orators — Historians — Jurists — Poets — Messala — Varius — Anser 
— Macer, .... ... 241 



CONTENTS. Xili 

CHArTER II. 

Virgil {70-19 B.C.). page 

Virgil — His earliest verses — His life and character — The minor poems 
— The Eclogues — The Georgics — Virgil's love of Nature — His 
aptitude for epic poetry — The scope of the Aeneid — The Aeneid 
a religious poem — Its relation to preceding poetry, . . 252 

Appendix. — Note I. Imitations of Yirgil in Propertius, Ovid, and 

Manilius, ..... 275 

II. On the shortening of final o in Latin poetry, . 277 

III. On parallelism in Virgil's poetry, , . 277 

IV. On the Legends connected with Virgil, . 278 



Chapter III. 

Horace (65-8 B.C.). 

Horace — His life — The dates of his works — Two aspects : a lyric poet 
and a man of the world — His Odes and Epodes — His patriotic 
odes — Excellences of the odes — The Satires and Epistles — Horace 
as a moralist — The Ars Foetica — Horace's literary criticism — 
Lesser poets . ' . . . • . 280 



Chapter IV. 

The Elegiac Poets — Gr alius — Manilius 

Roman elegy — Cornelius Callus — Domitius Marsus — Tibullus — Pro- 
pertius — Ovid — His life — The Art of Love — His exile — Doubtful 
and spurious poems — Lesser erotic and epic poets — Gratius — 
Manilius , . - . . . . . 297 



Chapter V. 

Prose Writers of the Augustan Age. 

Oratory Neglected — Declamation takes its place — Porcius Latro — 
Annaeus Seneca — History — Livy — Opportune, appearance of his 
work — Criticism of his method — Pompeius Trogus — Vitruvius — 
Grammarians — Fenestella — Verrius Flaccus — Hyginus — Law and 
philosophy, , . . . . . .319 

Appendix. — Note I. A >S'wa.wna translated from Seneca, . . 335 

„ II. Some Observations on the Theory of Rhetoric, from 

Quintilian, Book III. . . .337 



XIV CONTENTS. 

BOOK III. 
THE DECLINE. 

mOM THE ACCESSION OF TIBERIUS TO THE DEATH OF M. AURELIUS, 
A.D. 14-180. 

Chapter I. 
The Age of Tiberiics (14-37 A.D.). page 

Sudden collapse of letters — Cause of this — Tiberius — Changed position 
of literature — Vellius Paterculus — Valerius Maximus — Celsus — 
E-emmius Palaemon — Germanicus — Phaedrus — Pomponius 
Secundus the tragedian, ...... 340 

Chapter II. 

The Reigns of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero (37-68 A.D.). 

1. Poets. 

The Neronian period an epoch — Peculiar characteristics of its writers 
— Literary pretensions of Caligula— of Claudius- -of Nero — Poem 
on Calpurnius Piso — Relation of philosophy to life — Cornutus— 
Persius — Lucan — Criticism of the Pharsalia — Eclogues of Calpur- 
nius — The poem on Etna — Tragedies of Seneca — The airoKoKo- 
Kvyruais, ........ 852 

Chapter III. 

The Reigns of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. 

2. Prose Writers — Seneca. 

His importance — Life and writings — Influence of his exile — Relations 
with Nero — His death — Is he a Stoic ? — Gradual convergence of 
the different schools of thought — Seneca a teacher more than any- 
thing else — His conception of philosophy — Supposed connection 
with Christianity — Estimate of his character and style, . . 378 

Chapter IV. 

The Reigns of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. ' 
3. Other Prose Writers. 

Domitius Corbulo — Quintus Curtius — Columella — Pomponius Mela — 
Valerius Probus — Petronius Arbiter — Account of his extant frag- 
ments, . . ... . . . .392 

Appendix. — Note I. The Testamentum Porcelli^ . . 397 

„ II. On the MS. of Petronius, . . 398 



CONTENTS. XV 



Chapter V. 
The Reigns of the Flavian Emperors (69-96 A.D.), 

1. Prose Writers. PAGE 

A new literary epoch^Marked by common cliaracteristics — Decay of 
national genius — Pliny the elder — Account of his death translated 
from the younger Pliny — His studious habits — The Natural History 
— Its character and value — Quintilian — Account of his book 
de Institutione Oratoria — Frontinus — ^A valuable and accurate 
writer — Grammatical studies, . . . • .400 

Appendix. — Quintilian's Criticism on the Eoman Authors, . , 413 



Chapter YI. 

TTie Beigns of Vespasian, Titics, and Domitian (69-96 A.D.). 
2. Poets. 

Keduced scope of poetry — Poetry the most dependent on external condi- 
^ tions of any form of written literature — Valerius Flaccus — Silius 
H' — His death as described by Pliny — His poem — The elder Statins 
V — Statins — An extempore poet — His public recitations — The Silvae 
■ — The Thehaid and AchilUid — His similes — Arruntius Stella 
— Martial — His death as recounted by Pliny — The epigram — 
Other poets, . . . . . . .418 

Appendix. — On the Similes of Virgil, Lucan, and Statins, , , 435 



Chapter VII, 

The Reigns of Nerva and Trajan (96-117 A.D.). 

Pliny the younger — His oratory — His correspondence — Letter to Trajan 
— Velius Longus — Hyginus — Balbus — Flaccus — Juvenal — His life 
A linished declaimer — His character — His political views — Style — 
Tacitus — Dialogue on eloquence — Agricola — Germania — Histories 
— Annals — intended work on Augustus's reign — Style, • • 437 



Chapter VIII. 

The Reigns of Hadrian and the Antonines (117-180 a.d.). 

Era of African Latinity — Differs from the Silver Age — Hadrian's poetry 
— Suetonius — His life — List of writings — Lives of the Caesars — His 
account of Nero's death — Florus — Salvius Julianus and Sextus 
Pomponius — Fronto — His relations with Aurelius — List of his works 
— Gellius — Gains — Poems of the period — Pcrvigiliuin Veneris — 
Apuleius — De Magia — Metamorphoses or Golden Ass — Cupid and 
Psyche — his philosojthicAl works, . _ , ^ . 45^ 



XVI CONTENTS. 



Chapter IX, 



State of PhilosopMcal and Religious Thought during the Period of the 

Antonines^Conclusion. 

PAGE 

Greek eloquence revives in the Sophists — Itinerant rhetors — Cynic 
preachers of virtue — The hetter class of popular philosophers — Die 
Chrysostom — Union of philosophy and rhetoric — Greek now the 
language of general literature — Reconciliation of philosophy with 
religion — The Platonist school — Apuleius — Doctrine of daemons 
— Decline of thought — General review of the main features of 
Eoman literature— Conclusion, . • • / .^472 



Chronological Table, • • • • • -. i^Z 

Ltst^of Editions Recommended, . • • • . 487 

Questions or Subjects for Essays, &a , . » » . 490 

Index, , • , * » ^, . 495 



HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 



rN-TRODUCTIOK 

In tlie latter part of tlie seventeenth century, and during nearly 
the whole of the eighteenth, the literature of Eome exercised an 
imperial sway over European taste. Pope thought fit to assume an 
apologetic tone when he cJuthcd Homer in an English dress, and 
reminded tne world that, as compared T\'ith Virgil, the Greek poet 
had at least the merit of coming first. His own mind was of an 
emphatically Latin order. The great poets of his day mostly based 
their art on the canons recognised by Horace. And when poetry 
was thus affected, it was natural that philosophy, history, and criti- 
cism should yield to the same influence. A rhetorical form, a satirical 
spirit, and an appeal to common sense as supreme judge, stamp most 
of the writers of western Europe as so far pupils of Horace, Cicero, 
and Tacitus. At present the tide has turned. We are living in a 
period of strong reaction. The nineteenth century not only differs 
from the eighteenth, but in all fundamental questions is opposed 
to it. Its products have been strikingly original. In art, poetry, 
science, the spread of culture, and the investigation of the basis of 
truth, it yields to no other epoch of equal length in the history of 
modern times. If we go to either of the nations of antiquity to 
seek for an animating impulse, it will not be Eome but Greece 
that will immediately suggest itself to us. Greek ideas of aesthetic 
beauty, and Greek freedom of abstract thought, are being dissemi- 
nated in the world with unexampled rapidity. Rome, and her 
soberer, less original, and less stimulating literature, find no place for 
influence. The readiness with which the leading nations drink from 
the well of Greek genius points to a special adaptation between 
the two. Epochs of upheaval, when thought is rife, progress rapid, 
and tradition^ political or religious, boldly exammed, turn, a.s if 

A 



2 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

by necessity, to ancient Greece for inspiration. The Church of the 
second and third centuries, when Christian thought claimed and 
won its place among the intellectual revolutions of the world, did 
not disdain the analogies of Greek philosophy. The Eenaissance 
owed its rise, and the Eef ormation much of its fertility, to the study 
of Greek. And the sea of intellectual activity which now surges 
round us moves ceaselessly about questions which society has not 
asked itself since Greece started them more than twenty centuries 
age. On the other hand, periods of order, when government is 
strong and progress restrained, recognise their prototypes in the 
civilisation of Eome, and their exponents in her literature. Such 
was the time of the Church's greatest power : such was also that 
of the fully developed monarchy in France, and of aristocratic 
ascendancy in England. Thus the two literatures wield alter- 
nate influence ; the one on the side of liberty, the other on 
the side of government ; the one as urging restless movement 
towards the ideal, the other as counselling steady acceptance of the 
real. 

From a more restricted point of view, the utility of Latin litera- 
ture may be sought in the practical standard of its thought, and 
in the almost faultless correctness of its composition. On the for- 
mer there is no need to enlarge, for it has always been amply recog- 
nised. The latter excellence fits it above all for an educational 
use. There is probably no language which in this respect comes 
near to it. The Eomans have been called with justice a nation 
of grammarians. The greatest commanders and statesmen did 
not disdain to analyse the syntax and fix the spelling of their 
language. From the outset of Eoman literature a knowledge of 
scientific grammar prevailed. Hence the act of composition and 
the knowledge of its theory went hand in hand. The result is that 
among Eoman classical authors scarce a sentence can be detected 
Yv^hich ofi'ends against logical accuracy, or defies critical analysis. 
In this Latin stands alone. The powerful intellect of an Aeschylus 
or Thucydides did not prevent them from transgressing laAvs which 
in their day were undiscovered, and which their own ^vritings 
helped to form. Nor in modern times could we find a single 
language in which the idioms of the best writers could be reduced 
to conformity with strict rule. French, which at first sight appears 
to ofi'er such an instance, is seen on a closer view to be fuller of 
illogical idioms than any other language ; its symmetrical exactness 
arises from clear combination and restriction of single forms to 
a single use. English, at least in its older form, abounds in 
special idioms, and German is still less likely to be adduced. As 
long, therefore, as a penetrating insight into syntactical structure is 



INTKODUCTION. 3 

considered desirable, so long will Latin offer tlie best field for ob- 
taining it. In gaining accuracy, however, classical Latin suffered 
a grievous loss. It became a cultivated as distinct from a natural 
language. It was at first separated from the dialect of the people, 
and afterwards carefully preserved from all contamination by it. 
Only a restricted number of words were admitted into its select 
vocabulary. We learn from Servius that Virgil was censured for 
admitting avunculus into epic verse ; and Quintilian says that 
the prestige of ancient use alone permits the appearance in litera- 
ture of words like halare, hlnnire, and all imitative sounds. ^ 
Spontaneity, therefore, became impossible, and soon invention also 
ceased ; and the imperial writers limit their choice to such words 
as had the authority of classical usage. In a certain sense, there- 
fore, Latin was studied as a dead language, while it was still a 
living one. Classical composition, even in the time of Juvenal, 
must have been a labour analagous to, though, of course, much 
less than, that of the Italian scholars of the sixteenth century. It 
was inevitable that when t'le repositaries of the literary idiom were 
dispersed, it should at once fall into irrecoverable disuse ; and 
though never properly a dead language, should have remained as 
it began, an artificially cultivated one.^ An important claim on 
our attention put forward by Eoman literature is founded upon 
its actual historical position. Imitative it certainly is.^ But it is 
not the only one that is imitative. All modern literature is so too, 
in so far as it makes a conscious effort after an external standard. 
Eome may seem to be more of a copyist than any of her successors ; 
but then they have among other models Eome herself to follow. 
The way in which Eoman taste, thought, and expression have 
found their way into the modern world, makes them peculiarly 
worthy of study ; and the deliberate method of undertaking liter- 
ary composition practised by the great writers and clearly trace- 
able in their productions, affords the best possible study of the 
laws and conditions under which literary excellence is attainable. 
Eules for composition would be hard to draw from Greek examples, 
and would need a Greek critic to formulate them. But the con- 
scious workmanship of the Eomans shows us technical method as 
separable from the complex aesthetic result, and therefore is an ex- 
cellent guide in the art. 

^ Quint. I, 5, 72. The whole chapter is most interesting, 
2 How different has been the lot of Greek ! An educated Greek at the 
present day would find little difficulty in understanding Xenophon or 
Menander, The language, though shaken by rude convulsions, has changed 
according to its own laws, and shown that natural vitality that belongs to 
a genuinely popular speech. 
^ See Conington on the Academical Study of Latin. Post. Works, i. 206. 



4 HISTOEY OF KOMAN LITERATURE. 

Tlie traditional account of tlie origin of literature at Rome,^ 
accepted by tlie Romans themselves, is that it was entirely due to 
contact with Greece. Many scholars, however, have advanced 
the opinion that, at an earlier epoch, Etruria exercised an impor- 
tant influence, and that much of that artistic, philosophical, and 
literary impulse, which we commonly ascribe to Greece, was in its 
elements, at least, really due to her. Mommsen's researches have 
re-established on a firmer basis the superior claims of Greece. He 
shows that Etruscan civilisation was itself modelled in its best 
features on the Hellenic, that it was essentially weak and unpro- 
gressive and, except in religion (where it held great sway) and in 
the sphere of public amusements, unable permanently to impress 
itself upon Rome.^ Thus the literary^ epoch dates from the con- 
quest of Magna Graecia. After the fall of T arentuin the Rom^ans 
were suddenly familiarised with the chief products oi the Hellenic 
mind ; and the first Punic war which followed, unlike all previous 
wars, was favourable to the effects of this introduction. Eor it 
was waged far from Roman soil, and so relieved the people from 
those daily alarms which are fatal to the calm demanded by 
study. Moreover it opened Sicily to their arms, where, more 
than in any part of Europe except Greece itself, the treasures of 
Greek genius were enshrined. A systematic treatment of Latin 
literature cannot therefore begin before Livius Andronicus. The 
preceding ages, barren as they were of literary effort, afford 
little to notice except the progress of the language. To this subject 
a short essay has been devoted, as well as to the elements of 
literary development which existed in Rome before the regular 
literature. There are many signs in tradition and early history of 
relations between Greece and Rome; as the decemviral legisla- 
tion, the various consultations of the Delphic Oracle, the legends 
of Pythagoras and Numa, of Lake RegiUus, and, indeed, the 
whole story of the Tarquins ; the importation of a Greek alphabet, 
and of several names familiar to Greek legend — Ulysses, PoenuSy 
Catamitus, &c. — all antecedent to the Pyrrhic war. But these are 
neither numerous enough nor certain enough to afford a sound 
basis for generalisation. They have therefore been merely 
touched on in the introductory essays, which simply aim at a 
compendious registration of the main points ; all fuller informa- 
tion belonging rather to the antiquarian department of history 
and to philology than to a sketch of the written literature. 
The divisions of the subject will be those naturally suggested 
by the history of the language, and recently adopted by 
Teuffel, i.e. — 

1 See esp. R. H. Bk. 1, ch. ix. and xv. 



INTRODUCTION. 5 

1. The sixth and seventh centuries of the city (240-80 b.c.), 
from Livius to Sulla. 

2. The Golden Age, from Cicero to Ovid (80 b.c.-a.d. 14). 

3. The period of the Decline, from the accession of Tiberius to 
the death of Marcus Aurelius (14-180 a.d.). 

These Periods are distinguished by certain strongly marked 
characteristics. The Eirst, which comprises the history of the 
legitimate drama, of the early epos and satire, and the beginning 
of prose composition, is marked by immaturity of art and 
language, by a vigorous but iU-disciplined imitation of Greek 
poetical models, and in prose by a dry sententiousness of style, 
gradually giving way to a clear and fluent strength, which was 
characteristic of the speeches of Gracchus and Antonius. This 
was the epoch when literature was popular; or at least more 
nearly so than at any subsequent period. It saw the rise and fall 
of dramatic art : in other respects it merely introduced the forms 
which were carried to perfection in the Ciceronian and Augustan 
ages. The language did not greatly improve in smoothness, oi 
adaptation to express finished thought. The ancients, indeed, 
saw a difi'erence between Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius, but it may 
be questioned whether the advance would be perceptible by us. 
Still the labor limae unsparingly employed by Terence, the rules 
of good writing laid down by Lucilius, and the labours of the 
great grammarians and orators at the close of the period, pre- 
pared the language for that rapid development which it at once 
assumed in the masterly hands of Cicero. 

The Second Period represents the highest excellence in prose 
and poetry. The prose era came first, and is signalised by the 
names of Cicero, Sallust, and Caesar. The celebrated writers 
were now mostly men of action and high position in the state. 
The principles of the language had become fixed ; its grammatical 
construction was thoroughly understood, and its peculiar genius 
wisely adapted to those forms of composition in which it was 
naturally capable of excelling. The perfection of poetry was not 
attained until the time of Augustus. Two poets of the highest 
renown had indeed floimshed in the republican period; but 
though endowed with lofty genius they are greatly inferior to 
their successors in sustained art, e.g. the constructions of prose still 
dominate unduly in the domain of verse, and the intricacies of 
rhythm are not fully mastered. On the other hand, prose has, in 
the Augustan age, lost somewhat of its breadth and vigour. 
Even the beautiful style of Livy shows traces of that intrusion 
of the poetic element which made such destructive inroads into 
the manner of the later prose writers. In this period the A\Titer3 



e 



6 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

as a rule are not public men, but belong to wbat we should call 
the literary class. They wrote not for the public but for the 
select circle of educated men whose ranks were gradually narrow- 
ing their limits to the great injury of literature. If we ask 
which of the two sections of this period marks the most strictly 
national development, the answer must be — the Ciceronian ; for 
while the advancement of any literature is more accurately tested 
by its prose writers than by its poets, this is specially the case 
with the Romans, whose genius was essentially prosaic. Attention 
now began to be bestowed on physical science, and the applied 
sciences also received systematic treatment. The rhetorical 
element, which had hitherto been overpowered by the oratorical, 
comes prominently forward ; but it does not as yet predominate to 
a prejudicial extent. 

The Third Period, though of long duration, has its chief char- 
acteristics clearly defined from the beginning. The foremost of 
these is unreality, arising from the extinction of freedom and 
consequent loss of interest in public life. At the same time, the 
Eomans, being made for political activity, did not readily content 
themselves with the less exciting successes of literary life. The 
applause of the lecture-room was a poor substitute for the thunders 
of the assembly. Hence arose a declamatory tone, which strove 
by frigid and almost hysterical exaggeration to make up for the 
healthy stimulus afforded by daily contact with affairs. The vein 
of artificial rhetoric, antithesis, and epigram, which prevails from 
Lucan to Pronto, owes its origin to this forced contentment with 
an uncongenial sphere. With the decay of freedom, taste sank, 
and that so rapidly that Seneca and Lucan transgress nearly as 
much against its canons as writers two generations later. The 
flowers which had bloomed so delicately in the wreath of the 
Augustan poets, short-lived as fragrant, scatter their sweetness no 
more in the rank weed-grown garden of their successors. 

The character of this and of each epoch will be dwelt on more 
at length as it comes before us for special consideration, as well as 
the social or religious phenomena which influenced the modes of 
thought or expression. The great mingling of nationalities in 
Eome during the Empire necessarily produced a corresponding 
divergence in style, if not in ideas. ^Nevertheless, although we 
can trace the national traits of a Lucan or a IMartial underneath 
their Eonian culture, the fusion of separate elements in the vast 
capital was so complete, or her influence so overpowering, that the 
general resemblance far outweighs the differences, and it is easy 
to discern the common features which signalise unmistakeably the 
writers of the Silver Age. 



BOOK L 



BOOK I. 



CHAPTEE L 
On the Earliest Eemains of the Latin Language, 

i 

The question, Who were tlie earliest inliabitants of Italy ? is one 
that cannot certainly he answered. That some lower race, analo- 
gous to those displaced in other parts of Europe ^ by the 
Celts and Teutons, existed in Italy at a remote period is indeed 
highly probable ; but it has not been clearly demonstrated. At 
the dawn of the historic period, we find the Messapian and lapy- 
gian races inhabiting the extreme south and south-west of Italy ; 
and assuming, as we must, that their migrations had proceeded 
by land across the Apennines, we shall draw the inference that 
they had been gradually pushed by stronger immigrants into 
the furthest corner of the Peninsula. Thus we conclude mth 
Mommsen that they are to be regarded as the historical aborigines 
of Italy. They form no part, however, of the Italian race. Weak 
and easily acted upon, they soon ceased to have any influence on 
the immigrant tribes, and within a few centuries they had aU but 
disappeared as a separate nation. The Italian races, properly 
so called, who possessed the country at the time of the origin of 
Rome, are referable to two main groups, the Latin and the 
Umbrian. Of these, the Latin was numerically by far the 
emaller, and was at first confined A\dthin a narrow and somewhat 
isolated range of territory. The Umbrian stock, including the 
Samnite or Oscan, the Volscian and the Marsian, had a more 
extended area. At one time it possessed the district afterwards 
known as Etruria, as well as the Sabellian and Umbrian territories. 
Of the numerous dialects spoken by this race, two only are in 
some degTee known to us (chiefly from inscriptions) the Umbrian 
1 E.g. Finns, Lapps, or other Turanian tribes. 



10 HISTOr.Y OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

and the Oscan. These show a close affinity with one another, and 
a decided, though more distant, relationship with the Latin. All 
three belong to a well-marked division of the Indo-European 
speech, to which the name of Italic is given. Its nearest congener 
is the Hellenic, the next most distant being the Celtic. The Hel- 
lenic and Italic may thus be called sister languages, the Celtic 
standing in the position of cousin to both, though, on the whole, 
more akin to the Italic.^ 

The Etruscan language is still a riddle to philologists, and until 
it is satisfactorily investigated the ethnological position of the 
people that spoke it must be a matter of dispute. The few words 
and forms which have been deciphered lend support to the other- 
wise more probable theory that they were an Indo-Germanic race 
only remotely allied to the Italians, in respect of whom they 
maintained to quite a late period many distinctive traits. ^ But 
though the Eomans were long familiar with the literature and 
customs of Etruria, and adopted many Etruscan words into their 
language, neither of these causes influenced the literary develop- 
ment of the Eomans in any appreciable degree. Italian philology 
and ethnology have been much complicated by reference to the 
Etruscan element. It is best to regard it, like the lapygian, as 
altogether outside the pale of genuine Italic ethnography. 

The main points of correspondence between the Italic dialects as 
a whole, by which they are distinguished from the Greek, are as 
follow : — Eirstly, they all retain the spirants S, J (pronounced Y), 
and V, e.g. sub, vespera, janitrlces, beside viro, laTrepa, ctvarepe?. 
Agam, the Italian zt is nearer the original sound than the Greek. 
The Greeks sounded v like ii, and expressed the Latin u for the 
most part by ov. On the other hand the Italians lost the aspirated 
letters th, ph, ch, which remain in Greek, and frequently omitted 
the simple aspirate. They lost also the dual both in nouns andr 
verbs, and all but a few fragmentary forms of the middle verb. 
In inflexion they retain the sign of the ablative {d), and, at least 
in Latin, the dac. piur. in bus. They express the passive by the 
letter r, a weakened form of the reflexive, the principle of which 
is reproduced in more than one of the Eomance languages. 

On the other hand, Latin differs from the other Italian dialects 
in numerous points. In pronouns and elsewhere Latin q becomes 
2) in Umbrian and Oscan [pis^qiiis). Again, Oscan had two 

^ The Latin agrees with the Celtic in the retention of the dat. plur. in 
hits (Celt, ih), Rigaih^-^rcgihus ; and the pass, in r, Berthar—jcrtur. 

2 Cf. Plant. Cure. 150, Lycli (v. 1, ludii) harhari. So Vos, Tusci ac barbari, 
Tib. Gracch. apud Cic. de Div. ii. 4. Compare Virgil's Fingim 
Tgrrhcnus. 



THE EAIvLIEST IIEMAINS OF THE LATIN LANGUAGE. 11" 

vowels more than Latin and was much more conserv^ative of 
diphthongal sounds ; it also used double consonants, which old 
Latin did not. The Oscan and Umbrian alphabets Avere taken from 
the Etruscan, the Latin from the Greek ; hence the former lacked 
Q X, and used I or it {sc-tn or soft z) for z {zefa = ds). They 
possessed the spirant F which they expressed by 8, and used the 
symbol ^ to denote V or W. They preserved the old genitive in 
as or ar (Lat. ai, ae) and the locative, both which were rarely 
found in Latin; also the Indo-European future in so {didest^ 
her est) and the infin. in um {e.g. ezum = esse). 

The old Latin alphabet was taken from the Dorian alphabet of 
Cumae, a colony from Chalcis, and consisted of twenty-one 
letters, ABCDErZHIKLM:N'OPQESTVX, to 
which the original added three more, O or O {th), O {ph), and \|^ 
(ch). These were retained in Latin as numerals though not as letters, 
6 in the form of C= 100, or M as 1000, and vV or L as 50. 

Of these letters Z fell out of use at an early period, its poAver 
being expressed by S (Sar/untum = ZdKvvOos) or SS (massa = 
fid^a). Its rejection was followed by the introduction of G. 
Plutarch ascribes this change to Sp. Carvilius about 231 B.C., but 
it is found on inscriptions nearly fifty years earlier.^ In many 
words C was written for G down to a late period, e.g. CN. was 
the recognised abbreviation for Gnaeus. 

In Cicero's time Z was taken into use again as well as the 
Greek Y, and the Greek combinations TH, PH, CH, chiefly for 
purposes of transliteration. The Emperor Claudius introduced 
three fresh symbols, two of which appear more or less frequently 
on monuments of his time. They are d or "^, the inverted 
digamma, intended to represent the consonantal Y : Q, or anti- 
sigma, to represent the Greek ^, and h to represent the Greek 
V with the sound of the Erench u or German il. The second is 
not found in inscriptions. 

Other innovations were the doubling of vowels to denote length, 
a device employed by the Oscans and introduced at Eome by the 
poet Accius, though Quintdian ^ implies that it Avas knoT\Ti before 
his time, and the doubling of consonants which was adopted from 
the Greek by Ennius. In Greek, hoAvever, such doubling gener- 
ally, though not always, has a philological justification. ^ 

^ Tt is probable that Sp. Carvilius merely popularised the use of this 
let ^.. J-, aud perhaps gave it its place in the alphabet as seventh letter. 

2 Inst. Or. 1, 7, 14. 

8 In Cicero's time the semi-vowel j in the middle of words was oftf^n 
denoted by ii ; and the long vowel i represented by the prolongation of the 
letter above and sometimes below the line. 



12 HISTOKY OF ROMAN LITERATUKE. 

The pronoimciation of Latin has recently been the subject of 
much discussion. It seems clear that the vowels did not differ 
greatly, if at all, from the same as pronounced by the modern 
Italians. The distinction between E and I, however, was less 
clearly marked, at least in the popular speech. Inscriptions and 
manuscripts afford abundant instances of their confusion. Menerva 
leher magester are mentioned by Quintilian,^ and the employment 
of ei for the i of the dat. pi. of nouns of the second declension 
and of nohis voMs, and of e and i indifferently for the ace. pi. 
of nouns of the third declension, attest the similarity of sound. 
That the spirant J was in all cases pronounced as Y there is 
scarcely room for doubt. The pronunciation of V is still unde- 
termined, though there is a great preponderance of evidence in 
favour of the W sound having been the original one. After the 
first century a.d. this semi-vowel began to develop into the labio- 
dental consonant v, the intermediate stage being a labial v, such 
as one may often hear in South Germany at the present day, and 
which to ordinary ears would seem undistinguishable from w. 

There is little to remark about the other letters, except that 
S, N, and M became very weak when final and were often entirely 
lost. S was rehabilitated in the literary dialect in the time of 
Cicero, who speaks of the omission to reckon it as subrusticum; 
but final M is always elided before a vowel. An illustration of 
the way in which final M and IST were weakened may be found 
in the nasalised pronunciation of them in modern Erench {main, 
falm). The gutturals C and G have by some been supposed to 
have had from the first a soft sibilant sound before E and I ; but 
from the silence of all the grammarians on the subject, from the 
transcriptions of C in Greek by k, not o- or t, and from the 
inscriptions and MSS. of the best ages not confusing CI with TI, 
we conclude that at any rate until 200 a.d. C and G were 
sounded hard before all vowels. The change operated quickly 
enough afterwards, and to a great extent through the influence of 
the Umbrian which had used d or (^ before E and I for some time. 

In spelling much irregularity prevailed, as must always be the 
case where there is no sound etymological theory on which to 
base it. In the earliest inscriptions we find many inconsistencies. 
The case-signs m, d, are sometimes retained, sometimes lost. In 
t' ; second Scipionic epitaph we have omo {unum) side by side 
"with Luciom. In the Columna Rostrata (260 B.C.) we have c for 
g, single instead of double consonants, et for it in ornavet, and o 
for u in terminations, aU marks of ancient spelling, contrasted 

^1,4,7. 



TliJ" EARLIEST REMAINS OF THE LATIN LANGUAGE. 13 

"with maxhnos, maxumos ; navehos, naveboiis ; praeda, and otlier 
inconsistent or modern forms. Perhaps a later restoration may 
account for these. In the decree of Aemilius, posediseut and 
■possidere are found. In the Lex Agraria we have pequnia and 
2)ecuma, in S. C. de Bacchanalibus, senatuos and nominas (gen. 
siRg.),^cousoluerunt and cosoleretur, &c., sho'vvuig that even in 
legal documents orthography was not fixed. It is the same in the 
MSS. of ancient authors. The oldest MSS. of Plautus, Lucretius, 
and Yirgil, are consistent in a considerable number of forms with 
themselves and with each other, but vary in a still larger number. 
In antiquity, as at present, there was a conflict between sound 
and etymology. A word was pronounced in one way; science 
suggested that it ought to be TVTitten in another. This accounts 
for such variations as i7i/?m2^m, 2m/?enwm ; atque, adque ; exspedo, 
expedo ; and the like (cases like haud, liaut ; saxum, saxsum ; 
are different). The best writers could not decide between these 
conflicting forms. A still greater fluctuation existed in English 
spelling in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ^ but it has 
since been overcome. Great writers sometimes introduced spellings 
of their own. Caesar wrote Pompeiii (gen. sing.) for Pompeii^ after 
the Oscan manner. He also brought the superlative simus into use. 
Augustus, following in his steps, paid great attention to ortho- 
graphy. His inscriptions are a valuable source of evidence for 
ascertaining the correctest spelling of the time. During and after 
the time of Claudius affected archaisms crept in, and the value 
both of inscriptions and MSS. is impaired, on the one hand, by 
the pedantic endeavour to bring spelling into accord with archaic 
use or etymology, and, on the other, by the increasing frequency 
of debased and provincial forms, which find place even in 
authoritative documents. In spite of the obscurity of the subject 
several principles of orthography have been definitely established, 
especially with regard to the older Latin, which will guide future 
editors. And the labours of Eitschl, Corssen, and many others, 
cannot fail to bring to light the most important laws of variability 
which have affected the spelling of Latin words, so far as the 
variation has not depended on mere caprice. ^ 

With these preliminary remarks we may turn to the chief 
monuments of the old language, the difficulties and uncertainties 
of which have been greatly diminished by recent research. They 
are partly inscriptions (for the oldest period exclusively so), and 

^ This subject is well illustrated ia the introduction to Masson's ed. of 
Todd's Milton. 

2 The reader should consult the introduction to Notes 1. in Munr^'s 
Lucretius. 



14 HISTORY OF KOMAX LITERATURE. 

partly public documents, preserved in tlie pages of antiquarians. 
Much may be learnt from the study of coins, which, though less 
ancient than some of the written literature, are often more archaic 
in their forms. The earliest of the existing remains is the song of 
the Arval Brothers, an old rustic priesthood {qui sacra puhlica 
faciunt 2)ropterea ut fruges ferant arva),^ dating from the times 
of the kings. This fragment was discovered at Eome in 1778, on 
a tablet containing the acts of the sacred college, and was 
supposed to be as ancient as Eomulus. The priesthood was a 
highly honourable office, its members were chosen for life, and 
emperors are mentioned among them. The yearly festival took 
place in May, when the fruits were ripe, and consisted in a kind 
of blessing of the first-fruits. The minute and primitive ritual 
was evidently preserved from very ancient times, and the hymn, 
though it has suffered in transliteration, is a good specimen of 
early Eoman worship, the rubrical directions to the brethren 
being inseparably united with the invocation to the Lares and Mars. 
According to Mommsen's division of the lines, the words are — 

Ends, Lases, iuvate, {ter 

Neve lue eue, Marmak, sins (v. sers) incure.ere in pleores . {ter) 

Satur FU, FERE Maes. Limen salt. Sta. Berber . (^c/-) 

Semunis alternei advocapit conctos . {ter) 

Ends, Marmor, iuvato . {ter) 

Triumpe . iQuinquies) 

The great difference between this rude dialect and classical Latin 
is easily seen, and we can well imagine that this and the Salian 
hymn of Numa were all but unintelligible to those who recited 
them. 2 The most probable rendering is as follows : — " Help us, 
Lares ! and thou, Marmar, suffer not plague and ruin to attack 
our folk. Be satiate, fierce Mars ! Leap over the threshold. 
Halt ! Now beat the ground. Call in alternate strain upon all 
the heroes. Help us. Maimer. Bound high in solemn measure." 
Each line was repeated thrice, the last word five times. 

As regards the separate words, enos, which should perhaps be 
written e nos^ contains the interjectional 6, which elsewhere 
coalesces Avith vocatives.^ Lases is the older form of Lares. Lue 
rue = litem ruem, the last an old word for ruinam, with the case- 
ending lost, as frequently, and the copula omitted, as in Patres 
Conscripti, &c. Marmar, Marmor, or Mamor, is the reduplicated 
form of 3Iars, seen in the Sabine Mamers. Sins is for sines, as 
advocapit for advocahitis.'^ Pleores is an ancient form of plureSf 
answering to the Greek TrXetom? in form, and to rov? iroXXov?, 
" the mass of the people " in meaning. Fu is a shortened im- 

^ Var. L. L. v. 85. 2 jjor. Ep. ii. 1, 86. ' E.g edepol, ccastor. 

* Prcb. an old optative, afterwards used as a fut. 



THE EARLIEST REMAINS OF THE LATIN LANGUAGE. 15 

perative.i Berber is for verhere, imper. of the old verhero, is, as 
triumpe from triunpere — triumphare. Semunes froni semo (se- 
homo "apart from man") an inferior deity, as we see from the 
Sabine Semo Sanctis ( = Dim Fidius). Much of this interpretation 
is conjectural, and other views have been advanced with regard 
to nearly every word, but the above given is the most probable. 

The next fragment is from the Salian hymn, quoted by Yarro.^ 
It appears to be incomplete. The words are : 

" Cozeulodoizeso. Omnia vero adpatula coemisse iamcusianes duo mis- 
ceruses dun ianus\'e vet pos melios eum recum . . . ," and a UtLle further on, 
"divum jmpta cante, divum dec supplicaute." 

The most probable transcription is : 

"Cliorauloedus ero ; Omnia vero adpatula concepere Tant curiones. 
Bonus creator es. Bonus Janus vivit, quo meliorem regum [terra Saturnia 
vidit nullum] ; and of the second, " Deorum inipetu canite, deorum deum sup- 
phciter canite." 

Here we observe the ancient letter z stianding for s and that for 
r, also the word ceriis masc. of ceres, connected with the root 
creare. Adpatula seems = clara. Other quotations from the 
Salian hymns occur in Festus and other late writers, but they are 
not considerable enough to justify our dwelling upon them. All of 
them will be found in Wordsworth's Fragments and Specimens 
of early Latin. 

There are several fragments of laws said to belong to the regal 
period, but they have been so modernised as to be of but slight 
value for the purpose of philological illustration. One or two 
primitive forms, however, remain. In a law of Eomulus, we read 
Si nnrus . . . plorassit . . . sacra divis j^^^'^^cntiim estod, where the 
full form of the imperative occurs, the only instance in the whole 
range of the language.^ A somewhat similar law, attributed to 
Numa, contains some interesting forms : 

" Si parentera puer verberit ast ole plorasit, puer divis parentum 

verberat ? ille ploraverit diis 
sacer esto." 

Much more interesting are the scanty remains of the Laws of 
the Twelve Tables (451, 450 B.C.). It is true we do not possess 
the text in its original form. The great destruction of monuments 
by the Gauls probably extended to these important witnesses of 
national progress. Livy, indeed, tells us that they were recovered, 
but it was probably a copy that was found, and not the original 

1 Cf. die. fer. 2 l, j^_ ^j 26, 27. 

^ Oscan estud. This is one of several points in which the oldest Latin 
approximates to the other Italian dialects, from which it gradually became 
■ Cf. 2^aricidas (Law of Numa) nom. sing, with Osc. Maras. 



16 "HISTOEY OF ROMAN LITEEATUEE. 

brass tables, since we never hear of tbese latter being subsequently 
exhibited in the sight of the people. Their style is bold and often 
obscure, owing to the omission of distinctive pronouns, though 
doubtless this obscurity would be greatly lessened if we had the 
entire text. Connecting particles are also frequently omitted, 
and the interdependence of the moods is less developed than in 
any extant literary Latin. For instance, the imperative mood is 
used in all cases, permissive as well as jussive, Si nolet arceram 
ne sternito, " If he does not choose, he need not procure a covered 
car." The subjunctive is never used even in conditionals, but 
only in final clauses. Those which seem to be subjunctives are 
either present indicatives {e.g. escit. vindidt) or second futures {e.g. 
faxii. rupsit.). The ablative absolute, so strongly characteristic of 
classical Latin, is never found, or only in one doubtful instance. 
The vrord igihir occurs frequently in the sense of " after that," 
*'in that case," a meaning which it has almost lost in the literary 
dialect. Some portion of each Table is extant. We subjoin an 
extract from the first. 

** 1. Si in ius vocat, ito, Ni it, antestamino : igitnr em capito. Si calvitur 
antestetur postea eum frustratur 

pedemve struit, manum endo iacito 
iniicito 

2. Hem ubi pacunt orato. Ni pacunt, in comitio aut in foro ante 

pagunt (cf. pacisci) 

meridiem caussam coiciunto. Com peroranto ambo praesentes. 
Una 

Post meridiem praesenti litem addicito. Si ambo praesentes, Sol occasus 
suprema tempestas esto." 

The difference between these fragments and the Latin of Plautus 
is really inconsiderable. But we have the testimony of Polybius^ 
with regard to a treaty between Eome and Carthage formed soon 
after -the Eegifugium (509 B.C.), and therefore not much 
anterior to the Decemvirs, that the most learned Eomans could 
scarcely understand it. We should infer from this that the lan- 
guage of the Twelve Tables, from being continually mioted to 
meet the exigencies of public life, was unconsciously moulded 
into a form intelligible to educated men ; and that this process 
continued until the time when hterary activity commenced. After 
that it remained untouched ; and, in fact, the main portion of the 
laws as now preserved shows a strong resemblance to the Latin of 
the age of Livius, who introduced the written literature. 

1 Pol. iii. 22. Polybius lived in the time of the younger Scipio ; but 
the antiquity of this treaty has recently been impugned. 



i 



IHE EARLIEST KEMAINS OF THE LATIN LANGUAGE. 17 

The next specimen will be the Columna Rostrata, or Column 
of Duillius. The original monument was erected to commemorate 
his naval victory over the Carthaginians, 260 B.C., but that which 
at present exists is a restoration of the time of Claudius. It has, 
however, been somewhat carelessly done, for several modernisms 
have crept into the language. But these are not sufficient to 
disprove its claim to be a true restoration of an ancient monument. 
To consider it a forgery is to disregard entirely the judgment of 
Quintilian,! who takes its genuineness for granted. It is in places 
imperfect— 

" Secestanosque . . . opsidioned exemet, lecionesque Cartaciniensis omnis 

maxiinosque macistratos luci palam post dies novem castreis exfociunt, 

niagistratus effugiunt 

Macelamque opidom vi pucnandod cepet. Enque eodem macistratud bene 

rem navebos niaiid consol primos ceset, copiasque clasesque navales piimos 

gessit 
ornavet paravetque. Cumque eis navebous claseis Poenicas omnis, item 
maxumas copias Cartaciuiensis, praesented Hanibaled dictatored olorom, 

illoruin 
inaltod marld pucnandod vicet. Vique navis cepet cum socieis septeresmom 
in alto septiremem 

unam, quinqueresmosque triresmosque naveis xxx : merset xiii. Aurom 

mersit 
captom numei (D(D(D DCC. arcentom captom praeda : numei CCCIo33 
CCCIQ33. Omne captom, aes CCCIqqq (plus vicies semel). Primos 
quoque navaled praedad poplom donavet primosque Cartaciniensis incenuos 

iugenuos 
duxit in triumpod." 

We notice here C for G, ET for IT, for Y on the one hand : 
on the other, praeda where we should expect praida, besides the 
inconsistencies alluded to on p. 13. 

The Mausoleum of the Scipios containing the epitaphs was dis- 
covered in 1780. The first of these inscriptions dates from 280 
B.C. or twenty years earlier than the Columna Eostrata, and is 
the earliest original Eoman philological antiquity of assignable 
date which we possess. But the other epitaphs on the Scipios 
advance to a later period, and it is convenient to arrange them 
all together. The earliest runs thus : — 

" Cornelius Lucius, | Scipio Barbatus, 
Gnaivod patre prognatus | fortis vir sapiensque, 
quoins forma virtu ] tei parisuma fuit,^ 
consol censor aidilis | quei fuit apiid vos, 
Taurasia Cisai'ma | Saninio cepit 
subigit omne Loucanam | opsidesque abdoucit.** 

J Inst. Or. i. 7, 12. 
2 Or, accentuating differently, "quoins forma virtiitei | parisuma fuit. 
We notice the strange quantity Lucius, which recalls the Homeric vtr epowKlTj. 

B 



18 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

The next, the title of which is painted and the epitaph graven, 
refers to the son of Barbatas. Like the preceding, it is written in 
Saturnian verse : 

*' Hone oino ploirume co | sentiont Romdi 
duonoro optumo fu | ise viro viroro 
Luciom Scifiioiie. | Filios Barbati 
consol censor aidilis | hie fuet apud vos 
hec cepit Corsiea 'Aleri | aque urbe pngnandod, 
dedet Tempestatebus | aide meretod votam." 

The more archaic character of this inscription suggests the 
explanation that the first was originally painted, and not engraven 
till a later period, when, as in the case of the Columna Eostrata, 
some of its archaisms (probably the more unintelligible) were 
suppressed. In ordinary Latin it would be : 

*' Hunc unum plurimi consentiunt Romani (or Romse) bonorum optimum 
fuisse virum virorum, Lucium Scipionem. Filius (erat) Barbati, Consul, 
Censor. Aedilis hie fuit apud vos. Hie cepit Corsicam Aleriamque urbem 
pugnando ; dedit tempestatibus aedem merito votam." 

The third epitaph is on P. Corn. Scipio, probably son of the great 
Africanus, and adopted father of Scipio Aemilianus : — 

** Qnei apice insigne dialis | flaminis gesistei 
mors jiei fecit tua ut essent | omnia brevia 
honos fcima virtiisque | gloria atque ingenium; 
quibus sei in longa liciii | set tibi litier vita 
facile factis superasses | gloriam maiorum. 
quare lubens te in gremiu | Scipio recipit 
terra, Publi, prognatum j Piiblio Corneli." 

The last which will be quoted here is that of L. Corn. Scipio, 
of uncertain date : 

•' Magna sapientia mul | tasque virtutes 
Aetate qnom parva | possidet hoc saxsum, 
quoiei vita defecit | non honos honore. 
Is hie situs, qui niinquam | victus est virtiitei, 
Annos gnatus vigmti | is Diteist mandatus, 
ne quairatis honore 1 quei minus sit mandatus." 

These last two are written in clear, intelligible Latin, the former 
showing in addition a genuine literary inspiration. Nevertheless, 
the student will perceive many signs of antiquity in the omission 
of the case-ending m, in the spellings gesistei, quom { = cum. prep.) 
in the old long quantities omnia famd facile and the unique 
quairatis. There are no less than five other inscriptions in the 
ilausoleum, one of which concludes with four elegiac lines, but 
they can hardly be cited with justice among the memorials of the 
old language. 

The Senatus Consultum de Bacc7ianaUhi(s, or, as some scholars 
prefer to call it, Epistola Consilium ad Teuranos (186 B.C.), found 
at Terra di Teriolc, in Calabria, in 1640, ia quite in its originai 



THE EARLIEST EEMAINS OF THE LATIN LANGUAGE. 19 

state. It is easily intelligible, and except in orthography, scarcely 
differs from classical Latin. AVe subjoin it entire, as it is a ver}^ 
complete and important specimen of the language, and with it we 
shall close our list : — 

"L Q. Marcius L. f. S(p) Postumius L. f. cos senatum consohieruntu. Oct- 

2. ob. apud aedem | Duelouai. Sc. arf. M. Claudi(u.s) M. f. 

Belloiiae Scribendo adfuerunt 

L. Valeri(ns) P. f. Q. Minuci(us) C. f.— 

3. De. Bacanulibus quel foideratei | esent ita exdeicendum censnere. 

4. Neiquis eorum Bacanal habnise velet. Sei ques [ esent quel 

vellet Si qui 

sibei deicerent necesus ese Bacanal habere, eeis ytei 

5. ad pr(aetorein) iirbanuni | Eomam venirent deque eeis rebus, 

6. ubei eorum verba audita esent, utei senatus | noster decerncret, dum ne 

minus Senatorbus C adesent, quom ea 
adessent 

7. res cosoleretur | Bacas vir nequis adiese velet ceivis Roma- 

8. nus neve nnminus Latini neve socium | quisquam, nisei 
pry^aetorem) urbanum adiesent, isque de senatuos sententiad, 

adiissent 

9. dum ne | minus Senatoribus C adesent, quom ea res cosoleretur, iousiset. 

Censuere. | 

iO. Sacerdos nequis vir eset. Magister neque vir neque mulier 

11. quisquam eset. [ Neve pecuniam quisquam eorum comoinem lia- 

communem 

12. buise velet, neve magistratum | neve pro magistratud, neque 

13. virum neque mulierem quiquam fecise velet. | Neve posthac inter sed 

coniourase 

14. neve comvovise neve conspondise | neve compromesise velet, neve quis- 

15. quam fidem inter sed dedise velet I Sacra in oquoltod ne quisquam 

occulto 

• 

16. fecise velet, neve in poplicod neve in | preivatod neve exstrad urbem 

17. sacra quisquam fecise velet, — nisei j pr(aetorem) urbanum adieset isque 

18. de senatuos sententiad, dum ne minus | senatoribus C adesent, uom ea 

res cosoleretur, iousiset. Censuere. 

19. Homines pious V oinvorsei virei atque mulieres sacra ne quisquam | 

universi 

20. fecise velet, neve inter ibei virei pious duobus mulieribus pious tri- 

21. bus I arfuise velent, nisei de pr(aetoris) urbani senatuosque sententiad, 

22. utei suprad | scriptum est. 

23. Haice utei in coventionid exdeicatis ne minus trinum | noundinum 

contione 

24. senatuosque sententiam utei scientes esetis — eorum | sententia ita fuit ; 

25. Sei ques esent, quel arvursum ead fecisent, quam suprad | scriptum 

adversum ea 

26. est, eeis rem caputalem faciendem censuere — atque utei | hoce in 

27. tabolara ahenam inceideretis, ita senatus aiquom censuit j | uteique earn 

aequum 



20 HISTORY GF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

28. iBgier ioubeatis ubei facilumed gnoscier potisit ; — atque | utei ea Ba- 

29. canalia, .sei qna sunt, exstrad quam sei quid ibei sacri est j ita utei 

suprad scriptum est, in diebus x . quibus vobis tabelai datai 
80. erunt, | faciatis utei disnurta sient — in agro Teurano." 

Tauriano 

"We notice tliat there are in tMs decree no doubled consonants, 
no ablatives without the final d (except the two last words, which 
are probably by a later hand), and few instances of ae or i for the 
older az, ei ; ol and ou stand as a rule for oe, u ; ques, eeis, for 
qui, ii. On the other hand us has taken the place of os as the 
termination of Romanus, Postumius, &c., and generally u is put 
instead of the older o. The pecidiarities of Latin syntax are here 
fully developed, and the language has become what we call 
classical. At this point literature commences, and a long succes- 
sion of authors from Plautus onwards carry the history of the 
language to its completion; but it should be remembered that 
few of these authors wrote in what was really the speech of the 
people. In most cases a literature would be the best criterion of 
a language. In Latin it is otherwise. The popular speech could 
never have risen to the complexity of the language of Cicero and 
Sallust. This Avas an artificial tongue, based indeed on the 
colloquial idiom, but admitting many elements borrowed from the 
Greek. If we compare the language and syntax of Plautus, who 
was a genuine popular A\T?iter, with that of Cicero in his more 
difficult orations, the difference will at once be felt. And after 
the natural development of classical Latin was arrested (as it 
abeady was in the time of Augustus), the interval between the 
colloquial and literary dialects became more and more wide. The 
speeches of Cicero could never have been unintelligible eveii to 
the lowest section of the city crowd, but in the third and fourth 
centuries it is doubtful whether the common people understood 
at all the artificially preserved dialect to which literature still 
adhered. Unfortunately our materials for tracing the gradual 
decline of the spoken language are scanty. The researches of 
Mommsen, Eitschl, and others, have added considerably to their 
number. And from these we see that the old language of the 
early inscriptions was subjected to a twofold process of growth. 
On the one hand, it expanded into the literary dialect under the 
hands of the Graecising aristocracy; on the other, it ran its course 
as a popular idiom, little affected by the higher culture for several 
centuries until, after the decay of classical Latin, it reappeaie in 
the fifth century, strikingly reminding us in many points of the 
earliest infancy of the language. The lingua plebeta, vulgaris, or 
rustica, connoted by the Gothic invasions, and by the native 



THE EAKLIEST REMAINS OF THE LATIN LANGUAGE. 



21 



languages of the other parts of the empire which it only partially 
supplanted, became eventually distinguished from the Lingua 
Latina (which was at length cultivated, even by the learned, 
only in Avriting,) by the name of Lingua Romana. It accord- 
ingly differed in different countries. The purest specimens of the 
old Lingua Eomana are supposed to exist in the mountains of 
Sardinia and in the country of the Orisons. In these dialects 
many of the most ancient formations were preserved, which, 
repudiated by the classical Latin, have reappeared in the Romance 
languages, bearing testimony to the inherent vitality of native 
idiom, even when left to work out its own development unaided 
by literature. 



APPENDIX. 

Examples of the corrupted dialect of the fifth and following 
centuries.'^ 



1. An epitaph of the fifth century. 



"Hie requiescit in pace domna 
domina 

Bonusa quix ann. xxxxxx et Domo 
quae vixit Domino 



Menna 



quixitannos . 
qui vixit annos 



Ea"beat 
Habeat 



anatema 
anathema 



a Juda si quis alteram 



omine snp. me posuerit . Ana- 

hominem super 

tema "abeas da trecenti deeem et 

habeas de trecentis 
octo patriarche qui chanones 

patriarchis canones 

esposuerunt et da s ca 'Xpi 
exposuerunt Sanctis Chiisti 

quatuor Eugvangelia" 
Evangel lis 



2. An instrument written in Spain under the government of 
the Moors in the year 742, a fragment of which is taken from 
Lanzi. The whole is given by P. Du Mesnil in his work on the 
doctrine of the Church. 

*' Non faciant suas missas nisi 
portis cerratis : sin peiter 

seratis (minus) pendant 



deeem pesantes argenti. Monasterie 
nummos Monasteriae 



quae sunt in eo mando . 



faciunt 
faciant 



Saracenis bona acolhcnsa sine vexa- 
vectigalia? 

tione neque forcia: vendant sine 
vi 



pecho taH pacto quod non vadant 
tribute 

foras de nostras terras." 
nostris terris 



^ From Thompson's Essay on the Sources and Formation of the Latin 
Language ; Hist, of Roman Literature ; EncyclopcccUa MetropoliLana. 



22 



HISTOKY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 



3. Tlie following is the oatli of fealty taken by Lewis, King of 
Germany, in 842 a.d. 

*' Pro Deo amur et pro Christian 
Dei amore Christiano 

poble et nostro corrmn salvameni 
popiilo nostra communi salute 

dist di enavant in quant 

de isto die in posterum quantum 

Dis saveretpodirmedunat : si 
Deus scire posse donet : sic (me) 

salverat eo cist meon fradre Karlo 
servet ei isti meo fratri Carolo 

et in adjudha et in cadhuna 

adjumento qualicunque 

cosa si cum om per 

caussa sic quomodo homo per 



dreit son fradra salvar 

rectum (=jure) suo fratri salvare 

distino: quidil mi altre 
destino : quod illemihi ex altera (parte) 

si fazet ; et ahludher nul 

sic faciet ; ab Lothario nullum 

plaid nunquam prendrai, qui 

consilium unquam accipiara, quod 

meon vol cist meon fradre 

mea voluntate isti meo fratri 

Karlo in damno sit." 
Carolo damnum 



CHAPTEE TL 

On the Beginnings of Roman Literature. 

MoMMSEN has truly remarked that the culminating point of 
Roman development was the period which had no literature. 
Had the Roman people continued to move in the same linte as 
they did before coming in contact with the works of Greek 
genius, it is possible that they might have long remained without 
a, literature. Or if they had T^TOught one out for themselves, it 
would no doubt have been very different from that which has 
come down to us. As it is, Roman literature forms a feature in 
human history quite mthout a parallel. We see a nation rich in 
patriotic feeling, in heroes legendary and historical, advancing 
step by step to the fullest solution then known to the world of 
the great problems of law and government, and finally rising by 
its virtues to the proud position of mistress of the nations, which 
yet had never found nor, apparently, even wanted, any intellectual 
expression of its life and growth, whether in the poet's inspired 
song or in the sober narrative of the historian. 

The cause of this striking deficiency is to be sought in the 
original characteristics of the Latin race. The Latin character, as 
distinguished from the Greek, was eminently practical^ and 
unimaginative. It was marked by good sense, not by luxuriant 
fancy : it Avas "natum rebus agendis." The acute intellect of the 
Romans, directing itself from the first to questions of war and 
politics, obtained such a clear and comprehensive grasp of legal 
and political rights as, united with an unwavering tenacity of 
purpose, made them able to administer with profound intelligence 
their vast and heterogeneous empire. But in the meantime 
reflective thought had received no impulse. 

The stern and some- -hat narrow training which was the inheri- 
tance of the governing class necessarily confined their minds to 
the hard realities of life. Whatever poetical capacity the Romans 
may once have had was thus effectually checked. Those aspira- 
tions after an ideal beauty which most nations that have become 



24 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. . 

great have embodied in " immortal verse " — if they ever existed 
in Eome — faded away before her greatness reached its meridian, 
only to be rekindled into a shadowy and reflected brightnes? 
when Eome herself had begun to decay. 

There is nothing that so powerfully influences literature as the 
national religion. Poetry, with which in all ages literature begins, 
owes its impulse to the creations of the religious imagination. 
Such at least has been the case with those Aryan races who have , 
been most largely endowed with the poetical gift. The religion 
of the Eoman difi'ered from that of the Greek in having no back- 
ground of mythological fiction. For him there was no Olympus 
with its half-human denizens, no nymph-haunted fountain, no 
deified heroes, no lore of sacred bard to raise his thoughts into the 
realm of the ideal. His religion was cold and formal. Consisting 
partly of minute and tedious ceremonies, partly of transparent 
allegories whereby the abstractions of daily life were clothed with 
the names of gods, it possessed no power over his inner being. 
Conceptions such as Sowing (Saturnus), War (Bellona), Boundary 
(Terminus), Faithfulness (Fides), much as they might influence 
the moral and social feehngs, could not be expanded into material 
for poetical inventions. And these and similar deities were the 
objects of his deepest reverence. The few traces that remained of 
the ancient nature-worship, unrelated to one another, lost their 
power of producing mythology. The Capitoline Jupiter never 
stood to the Eomans in a true personal relation. Neither Mars 
nor Hercules (who were genuine Italian gods) was to Eome what 
Apollo was to Greece. Whatever poetic sentiment was felt 
centred rather in the city herself than in the deities who guarded 
her. Eome was the one name that roused enthusiasm ; from first 
to last she was the true Supreme Deity, and her material aggran- 
disement was the never-exhausted theme of literary, as it had 
been the consistent goal of practical, efi'ort. 

The primitive culture of Latium, in spite of all that has been 
written about it, is still so little known, that ^t is hard to say 
whether there existed elements out of which k native art and 
literature might have been matured. But it is the opinion of the 
highest authorities that such elements did exist, though they 
never bore fruit. The yearly Eoman festival with its solemn 
dance, 1 the masquerades in the popidar carnival, ^ and the primi- 
tive litanies, aff'orded a basis for poetical growth almost identical 
with that which bore such rich fruit in Greece. It has been 
remarked that dancing formed a more important part of these 

^ The Ludi Romani, as they were afterwards called. ^ gatura. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF EOMAN LITEKATUEE. 25 

ceremonies than song. This must originally have been the case in 
Greece. also, as it is still in all primitive stages of culture. But 
whereas in Greece the artistic cultivation of the body preceded 
and led up to the higher conceptions of pure art, in Eome the 
neglect of the former may have had some influence in repressing 
the existence of the latter. 

If the Eomans had the germ of dramatic art in their yearly 
festivals, they had the germ of the epos in their lays upon distin- 
guished warriors. But the heroic ballad never assumed the lofty 
proportions of its sister in Greece. * Given up to women and boys 
it abdicated its claim to "widespread influence, and remained as it 
had begun, strictly "gentile." The theory that in a complete 
state place should be found for the thinker and the poet as well 
as for the warrior and legislator, was unknown to ancient Eome. 
Her whole development was based on the negation of this theory. 
It was only when she could no longer enforce her own ideal that 
she admitted under the strongest protest the dignity of the intel- 
lectual calling. This will partly account for her singular indifl'er- 
ence to historical study. With many qualifications for founding 
a great and original historical school, with continuous written 
records from an early date, with that personal experience of affairs 
without which the highest form of history cannot be written, the 
Eomans yet allowed the golden opportunity to pass unused, and 
at last accepted a false conception of history from the contem- 
porary Greeks, which irreparably injured the value of their greatest 
historical monuments. Had it been customary for the sober- 
minded men who contributed to make Eoman history for more 
than three centuries, to leave simple commentaries for the instruc- 
tion of after generations, the result would have been of incalcul- 
able value. For that such men were well qualified to give an 
exact account of facts is beyond doubt. But the exclusive 
importance attached to active life made them indiff'erent to such 
memorials, and they were content with the barren and meagre 
notices of the pontifical annals and the yearly registers of magis- 
trates in the temple of Capitoline Jupiter. 

These chronicles and registers on the one hand, and the hymns, 
laws,i and formulas of various kinds on the other, formed the only 
written literature existing in the times before the Punic wars. 
Besides these, there were a few speeches, such as that of Ap. 
Claudius Caecus (280 B.C.) against Pyrrhus, published, and it is 

' The early laws were called *'carmina," a term applied to any set fonn 
of words, Liv. i. 25, Lex horrcndi carminis. The theory that all laws were 
in the Satuniian rhythm is not by any means probai>le. 



26 HISTOKY OF LOMAN LITEEATURE. 

probable that tbe funeral orations of tbe great families were trans- 
mitted either orally or in Avriting from one generation to another, 
so as to serve both as materials for history and models of style. 

Much importance has been assigned by Niebuhr and others to 
the ballad literature that clustered round the great names of 
Eoman history. It is supposed to have formed a body of national 
poetry, the complete loss of which is explained by the success of 
the anti-national school of Ennius which superseded it. The sub- 
jects of this poetry were the patriots and heroes of old Eome, 
and the traditions of the republic and the struggles between the 
orders were faithfully reflected in it. Macaulay's Lays of Ancient 
Rome are a brilliant reconstruction of what he conceived to be 
the spirit of this early literature. It was written, its supporters 
contend, in the native Saturnian, and, while strongly leavened with 
Greek ideas, was in no way copied from Greek models. It was 
not committed to writing, but lived in the memory of the people, 
and may still be found embedded in the beautiful legends which, 
adorn the earlier books of Livy. Some idea of its scope may be 
fornied from the fragments that remain of Naevius, who was tho 
last of the old bards, and bewailed at his own death the extinction 
of Eoman poetry. Select lays were sung at banquets either by 
youths of noble blood, or by the family bard ; and if we possessed 
these lays, we should probably find in them a fresher and more 
genuine inspiration than in all the literature which followed. 

This hypothesis of an early Eoman epos analogous to the Homeric 
poems, but preserved in a less coherent shape, has met with a close 
investigation at the hands of scholars, but is almost universally 
regarded as " not proven." The scanty and obscure notices of the 
early poetry by no means warrant our drawing so wide an infer- 
ence as the Niebuhrian theory demands.^ All they prove is that 
the Eoman aristocracy, like that of all other warlike peoples, 
listened to the praises of their class recited by minstrels during 
their banquets or festive assemblies. But so far from the minstrel 
being held in honour as in Greece and among the Scandinavian, 
tribes, we are expressly told that he was in bad repute, being re- 
garded as little better than a vagabond. ^ Fui^thermore, if these 

1 The passages on which this theory was founded are chiefly the following: — 
** Cic. Brut. xix. utinain extavent ilia carmina, quae multis saeculis ante suam 
aetateni in epulis esse cantitata a singulis convivis de elarorura virorum lau- 
dibnsin Origin ibus scriptmn reliquit "Cato." Cf. Ttisc. i. 2, 3, and iv. 2, s.f. 
Varro, as quoted by Non, says: "In conviviis pueri modesti ut cantarent 
carmina antiqua, in quibus laudes erant maiorum, et assa voce et cum tibi- 
cine," Horace alludes to the custom, Od. iv. 15, 27, sqq. 

2 Poecicne arti Iionos non erat : si qui in ea re studebat, aut sese ad COU' 
vivia adplicabat, grassator vocabatur. — Cato ap. Aul Gell. N.A. xi. 2, 5. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF F.OMAN LITERATURE. 27 

lays liad possessed any merit, they would hardly have sunk into 
such complete oblivion among a people so conservative of all that 
was ancient. In the time of Horace N"aevius was as well known as 
if he had been a modern ; if, therefore, he was merely one, though 
the most illustrious, of a long series of bards, it is inconceivable 
that his predecessors should have been absolutely unknown. Cicero, 
indeed, regrets the loss of these rude lays ; but it is in the charac- 
ter of an antiquarian and a patriot that he speaks, and not of an 
appraiser of literary merit. The really imaginative and poetical 
halo which invests the early legends of Rome must not be attributed 
to individual genius, but partly to patriotic impulse working among 
a people for whom their city and her faithful defenders supplied 
the one material for thought, and partly, no doubt, though we know 
not in what degree, to early contact with the legends and culture 
of Greece. The epitaphs of the first two Scipios are a good cri- 
terion of the state of literary acquirement at the time. They are 
apparently uninfluenced by Greek models, and certainly do not 
present a high standard either of poetical thought or expression. 

The fact, also, that the Eomans possessed no native term for a 
poet is highly significant. Poeta., which Ave find as early as Nae- 
vius,i is Greek ; and vates, which Zeuss ^ traces to a Celtic root, 
meant originally " soothsayer," not " poet."^ Only in the Augustan 
period does it come into prominence as the nobler term, denoting 
that inspiration which is the gift of heaven and forms the peculiar 
privilege of genius. ^ The names current among the ancient Romans, 
lihrarius, scriha, were of a far less complimentary nature, and 
referred merely to the mechanical side of the art.^ These con- 
siderations all tend to the conclusion that the true point from 
which to date the beginnuig of Roman literature is that assigned by 
Horace,^ viz. the interval between the first and second Punic 
wars. It was then that the Romans first had leisure to contem- 
plate the marvellous results of Greek culture, revealed to them by 
the capture of Tarentum (272 B.C.), and still more conspicuously 
by the annexation of Sicily in the war Avith Carthage. In Sicily, 
even more than in Magna Graecia, poetry and the arts had a splen- 
did and enduring life. The long line of philosophers, dramatists, 
and historians was hardly yet extinct. Theocritus Avas still teach- 
ing his countrymen the ncAV poetry of rustic life, and many of the 
iiihabitants of the conquered provinces came to reside at Rome, 

] In his epitaph. ^ See Mommsen Hist. i. p. 240. 

^ It is a term of contempt in Enniiis, ' ' quos olim Fauni vatcsqac cane 
bant.'* 

* Viig. Eel. ix. 34. * Fest. p. 333a, M. 

« Ep. ii. 1, 162. 



28 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

and imported their arts and cultivation ; and from this period the 
history of Roman poetry assumes a regular and connected form.^ 

Besides the scanty traces of wiitten memorials, there were 
various elements in Eoman civilisation which received a speedy 
development in the direction of literature and science as soon as 
Greek influence was brought to bear on them. These may be 
divided into three classes, viz. rudimentary dramatic perfor- 
mances, public speaking in the senate and forum, and the study 
of jurisprudence. 

The capacity of the Italian nations for the drama is attested by 
the fact that three kinds of dramatic composition .were cultivated 
in Rome, and if we add to these the semi-dramatic Fescenninae, we 
shaU. complete the list of that department of literature. This very 
primitive type of song took its rise in Etruria ; it derives its name 
from Fescennium, an Etrurian town, though others connect it with 
fascinum, as if originally it were an attempt to avert the evil 
eye. 2 Horace traces the historj'- of this rude banter from its source 
in the harvest field to its city developments of slander and abuse,* 
which needed the restraint of the law. Livy, in his sketch of the 
rise of Roman drama,* alludes to these verses as altogether un- 
polished, and for the most part extemporaneous. He agrees with 
Horace in describing them as taking the form of dialogue {alternis), 
but his account is meagre in the extreme. In process of time the 
Fescennines seem to have modified both their form and character. 
From being in alternate strains, they admitted a treatment as if 
uttered by a single speaker, — so at least we should infer from Ma- 
crobius's notice of the Fescennines sent by Augustus toPollio,^ which 
were either lines of extempore raillery, or short biting epigrams, 
like that of Catullus on Vatinius,^ owing their title to the name 
solely to the pungency of their contents. In a general way they 
were restricted to weddings, and we have in the first Epitlialamium 
of Catullus,^ and some poems by Claudian, highly-refined specimens 

1 It has been argued from a passage in Livy (ix. 36), ^^ Hdbeo audorcs 
vulgo turn Romanos 2)ueros, sicut nunc Gi'aecis, ita Etruscis Uteris erudiri 
soHtos,^' that literature at Home must be dated from the final conquest of 
Etruria (294 B.C.) ; but the Romans had long before this date been familiar 
with Etruscan literatui-e, such as it was. We have no ground for supposing 
tliat they borrowed anything except the art of divination, and similar studies. 
Keither history nor dramatic poetry was cultivated by the Etruscans. 

2 Others, again, exY)\a.\n fascinum as = ^a\X(^s, and regard the songs as con- 
nected with the worship of the reproductive power in nature. This seems 
alien from the Italian system of worsliip, though likely enough to have 
existed in Etruria. If it ever had this character, it must have lost it before 
its introduction into Rome. 

3 E]). ii. 1, 139, sqq. ^ vii. 2. « Macr. S. ii. 4, 21. 
« C. lii. ^ C. Ixl 



THE BEGINNINGS OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 29 

of tliis class of composition. The Fescennines owed their popula.r- 
ity to the light-hearted temper of the old Italians, and to a readi- 
ness at repartee which is still conspicuous at the present day in 
many parts of Italy. 

With more of the dramatic element than the Fescennines, the 
Saturae appear to have early found a footing in Eome, though 
their history is difficult to trace. We gather from Livy^ that they 
were acted on the stage as early as 359 B.C. Before this the 
hoards had heen occupied by Etruscan dancers, and possihly, though 
not certainly, by improvisers of Fescennine buffooneries ; but soon 
after this date Saturae were performed by one or more actors to the 
accompaniment of the flute. The actors, it appears, sang as well 
as gesticulated, until the time of Livius, who set apart a singer for 
the interludes, while he himself only used his voice in the dialogue. 
The unrestrained and merry character of the Saturae fitted them for 
the after-pieces, which broke up the day's proceedings (exodium) ; 
but in later times, when tragedies were performed, this position 
was generally taken by the A tellana or the Mime. The name Satura 
(or Satira) is from lanx satura, the medley or hodge-podge, " quae 
referta variis multisque primltiis in sacro apud priscos diis infere- 
batur." Mommsen supposes it to have been the " masque of the 
full men " (saturi), enacted at a popular festival, while others have 
connected it with the Greek Satyric Drama. In its dramatic form 
it disappears early from history, and assumes with Ennius a dif- 
ferent character, which has clung to it ever since. 

Besides these we have to notice the Mime and the Atellanae. 
The former corresponds roughly with our farce, though the panto- 
mimic element is also present, and in the most recent period 
gained the ascendancy. Its true Latin name is Planipes (so 
Juvenal Planipedes audit Fabios^) in allusion to the actor's 
entering the stage barefoot, no doubt for the better exhibition of 
his agility. Mimes must have existed from very remote times in 
Italy, but they did not come into prominence until the later days 
of the Eepublic, when Laberius and Syrus cultivated them with 
marked success. We therefore defer noticing them until our 
account of that period. 

There still remain the f alulae Atellanae^ so called from Atella, 
an Oscan town of Campania, and often mentioned as Osci Ludi. 
These were more honourable than the other kinds, inasmuch as 
they were performed by the young nobles, wearing masks, and 
giving the reins to their power of improvisation. Teuffel 
(L. L. § 9) considers the subjects to have been " comic descrip- 

* Loc. cit. 2 Jqv, yiii, 191, 



30 HISTORY OY ROMAN LITERATURK 

tions of life in small towns, in wMcli tlie chief personages 
gradually assumed a fixed character." In the period of which 
we are now treating, i.e. before the time of a written literature, 
they were exclusively in the hands of free-born citizens, and, to 
use Livy's expression, were not allowed to be polluted by pro- 
fessional actors. But this hindered their progress, and it was 
not until several centuries after their introduction, viz., in the 
time of Sulla, that they received literary treatment. They 
adopted the dialect of the common people, and were more or less 
popular in their character. More details will be given when ive 
examine them in their completer form. All such parts of these 
early scenic entertainments as were not mere conversation or 
ribaldry, were probably composed in the Saturnian metre. 

This ancient rhythm, the only one indigenous to Italy, presents 
some points worthy of discussion. The original application of 
the name is not agreed upon. Thompson says, "The term 
Saturniics seems to have possessed two distinct applications. In 
both of these, however, it simply meant ' as old as the days of 
Saturn,' and, like the Greek 'QyvyLo<Sf was a kind of proverbial 
expression for something antiquated. Hence (1) the rude 
rhythmical effusions, which contained the early Eoman story, 
might be called Saturnian, not with reference to their metrical 
law, but to their antiquity ; and (2) the term Saturnius was also 
applied to a deftnite measure on the principles of Greek prosody, 
though rudely and loosely moulded — the measure employed by 
!N"aevius, which soon became antiquated, when Ennius introduced 
the hexameter — and which is the rrietrum Safurnivm recognised 
by the grammarians."^ Whether this measure was of Italian 
origin, as Niebuhr and Macaulay think, or was introduced from 
Greece at an early period, it never attained to anything like Greek 
strictness of metrical rules. To scan a line of Livius or ISTaevius, 
in the strict sense of the word, is by no means an easy task, since 
there was not the same constancy of usage with regard to quantity 
as prevailed after Ennius, and the relative prominence of syllables 
was determined by accent, either natural or metrical. By natural 
accent is meant the higher or lower pitch of the voice, which rests 
on a particular syllable of each word e.g. Lucius ; by metrical 
accent the ictus or beat of the verse, which in the Greek rhythms 
implies a long quantity, but in the Saturnian measure has nothing 
to do with quantity. The principle underlying the structure of the 
measure is as follows* It is a succession of trochaic beats, six ia 

* Some have imagined that, as Satumia tellus is used for Italy, so 
SoMrnius numeruH may simply mean the native or Italian rhythnk 
Bentley (Ep. Phal. xi.) shows that it is known to the Greeks. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF KOMAN LITEEATURE. 31 

all, preceded by a single syllable, as in tlie instance quoted by 
Macaulay : 

"The 1 queen was m her chamber eating bread and honey." 
So in the Scipionic epitapb, 

** Qui I bus si in longa licuiset tibi litier vita." 

These are, doubtless, the purest form of the measure. In these 
there is no break, but an even continuous flow of trochaic rhythm. 
But even in the earliest examples of Saturnians there is a very 
strong tendency to form a break by making the third trochaic 
beat close a word, e.g. 

**Cor I nehiis Lucius H Scipi6 Barbatus,'* 

and this structure prevailed, so that in the fragments of Livius 
and Naevius by far the greater number exhibit it. 

"WHien Greek patterns of versification were introduced, the 
Saturnian rhythm seems to have received a different explanation. 
It was considered as a compound of the iambic and trochaic 
systems. It might be described as an iambic heptliemimer 
followed by a trochaic dimeter hrachycatalectic. The latter 
portion was preserved with something like regularity, but the 
former admitted many variations. The best example of this 
Graecised metre is the celebrated line — 

*'Dabunt malum Metelli | Naevio poetae." 

If, however, we look into the existing fragments of !N"aevius 
and Livius, and compare them with the Scipionic epitaphs, we 
shall find that there is no appreciable difference in the rhythm ; 
that whatever theory grammarians might adopt to explain it, the 
measure of these poets is the genuine trochaic beat, so natural to 
a primitive people, ^ and only so far elaborated as to have in most 
cases a pause after the first half of the line. The idea that the 
metre had prosodiacal laws, which, nevertheless, its gxeatest 
masters habitually violated, ^ is one that would never have been 
maintained had not the desire to systematise all Latin prosody on 

^ The name rpoxaios, "the running metre," sufficiently indicates its 
applicability to early recitations, in which the rapidity of the singer's 
movements was essential to the desired effect. 

2 Attilius Fortunatianus, De Doctr. Metr. xxvi. Spengel (quoted TeufF. 
Eom. Lit. § 53, 3) assumes the following laws of Saturnian metre: — '* (1) The 
Saturnian line is asynartetic ; (2) in no line is it possible to omit more than 
one thesis, and then only the last but one, generally in the second half of the 
line ; (3) the caesura must never be neglected, and falls after the fourth 
thesis or the third arsis (this rule, however, is by no means universally 
observed); (4) hiatus is often permitted ; (5) the arsis may be solved, and 
the thesis replaced by pyrrhics or long syllables." 



32 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATUEE. 

a Greek basis prevaHed almost universally. The true theory of 
^fZ.^Y"- scansion is established beyond a doubt by the labours 
of Eitschl in regard to Plautus. This great scholar shows that, 
whereas after Enmus classic poetry was based on quantity alone, 
before him accent had at least as important a place ; and, indeed 
that m the determination of quantity, the main results in many 
cases were produced by the influence of accent. 

Accent (Gr. Trpoo-wSta) implied that the pronunciation of the 
accented syllable was on a higher or lower note than the rest of 
the word. It was therefore a musical, not a quantitative symbol. 
Ihe rules for its position are briefly as follows. Ko words but 
monosyllables or contracted forms have the accent on the last: 
dissyllables are therefore always accented on the first, and poly- 
syUables on the^first or second, according as the penultimate is 
short or long Lucius, cecidi. At the same time, old Latin was 
burdened with a vast number of suffixes with a long final vowel. 
Ihe result of the non-accentuation of the last syUable was a con- 
tinual tendency to slur over and so shorten these suffixes. And 
this tendency was carried in later times to such an extent as to 
make the quantity of aU final vowels after a short syUable bearin- 
the accent indifferent. There were therefore two opposing con° 
siderations which met the poet in his capacity of versifier. There 
was the desire to retain the accent of every-day life, and so make 
his language easy and natural, and the desii-e to conform to the 
true quantity, and so make it strictly correct. In the early poets 
this struggle of opposing principles is clearly seen. Many 
apparent anomahes in versification are due to the influence of 
accent over-ridmg quantity, and many again to the preservation of 
^e original quantity in spite of the accent. Ennius harmonised 
mth great skill the claims of both, doing little more violence to 
the natural accent m his elaborate system of quantity than was done 
by the baturnian and comic poets with their fluctuating usage.i 

To apply these results to the Saturnian verses extant, let us 
select a few examples : j « uo 

"Gnaivod patre progndtus ( fdrtis vir sapiensque." 
orl'.vf r w """"^T^ ''''^* 1'^^''' ^^ *^^^ ^^«« «f syllables 

per hqui dum mare sudantes [ ditem vexarant. 

*l!J^^ r^^^"" "^'11 ^"^ *1^^« question discussed in Wagner's Aulularia- 
Where references are given to the original German authorities. ^^^^^^^^ 



THE BEGINNINGS OF KOMAN LITERATURE. 33 

or the unaccented syllable may be altogetb'^r canitted, as in the 
second half of the line — 

" ditem vexarant." 
In a line of !N^aevius — 

" Runciis atque Purpiireus j filii terras." 

we have in Purpureus an instance of accent dominating over 
quantity. But the first two words, in which the ictus is at 
variance with both accent and quantity, show the loose character 
of the metre. An interesting table is given by Corssen pro^'ing 
that the variance between natural and metrical accent is greater 
in the Saturnian verses than in any others, and in Plautus than 
in subsequent poets, and in iambics than in trochaics.^ We 
should infer from these facts (1) that the trochaic metre was the 
one most naturally suited to the Latin language; (2) that the 
progress in uniting quantity and accent, which went on in spite of 
the great inferiority of the poets, proves that the early poets did 
not understand the conditions of the problem which they had set 
before them. To follow out this subject into detail would be out 
of place here. The main point that concerns our present purpose 
is, that the great want of skill displayed in the construction of the 
Saturnian verse ^ shows the Romans to have been mere novices in 
the art of poetical composition. 

The Romans, as a people, possessed a peculiar talent for public 
speaking. Their active interest in political life, their youthful 

^ Dactylic poetry is not here included, as its progress is somewhat dif- 
ferent. In this metre we observe: (1) That when a dactyl or spondee ends 
a word, the natural and metrical accents coincide ; e.g. — 6ninia, silnt mihiy 
proriimpunt. Hence the fondness for such easy and natural endings as 
elauduntur hlmina 7i6cte, common in all writers down to Manilius. (2) That 
the caesura is opposed to the accent, e.g. — drma viriimqiie cdno \ Troiae \ 
qui. These anti-accentual rhythms are continually found in Virgil, Ovid, 
&c. from a fondness for cajsura, where the older writers have qui Troiae, and 
the like. (3) That it would be possible to avoid any collision between ictus 
and accent, e.g. — scilicet dmnibus est labor impendendus et dmnes : invetcrdscit 
et aegro in corde senescit, &c. But the rarity of such lines after Lucretius 
shows that they do not conform to the genius of the language. The corres- 
pondence thus lost by improved caesura is partially re-established by more 
careful elision. Elision is used by Virgil to make the verse run smoothly 
without violating the natural pronunciation of the words ; e.g. — moiistrum 
horrendum informe ; but this is only in the Aeneid, Such simple means of 
gaining this end as the Lucretian sive voluptas est, immoridli sunt, are alto- 
gether avoided by him. On the whole, however, among the Dactylic poets, 
from Ennius to Juvenal, the balance between natural and metrical accent 
remained unchanged. 

2 Most of the verses extant in this metre will be found in Wordsworth** 
Fraymemis mid SpecinicTis of Early Latin. 

O 



34 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

training and tlie necessity of managing their own afifairs at an 
age whicli in most countries would be wholly engrossed with, 
boyish sports, all combined to make readiness of speech an almost 
universal acquirement. The weighty earnestness {gr a vitas) peculiar 
to the national character was nowhere more conspicuously dis- 
plaj'-ed than in the impassioned and yet strictly practical discussions 
of the senate. Taught as boys to follow at their father's side, 
whether in the forum, at the law courts, in the senate at a great 
debate, or at home among his agricultural duties, they gained at 
an early age an insight into public business and a patient aptitude 
for work, combined with a power of manly and natural eloquence, 
which nothing but such daily famiharity could have bestowed. 
In the earlier centuries of Rome the power of speaking was 
acquired solely by practice. Eloquence was not reduced to the 
rules of an art, far less studied through manuals of rhetoric. 
The celebrated speech of Appius Clau,dius when, blind, aged, and 
infirm, he was borne in a litter to the senate-house, and by his 
burning words shamed the wavering fathers into an attitude 
worthy of their country, was the greatest memorial of this un- 
studied native eloquence. AVhen Greek letters were introduced, 
oratory, like everything else, was profoundly influenced by them ; 
and although it never, during the republican period, lost its 
national character, yet too much of mere display was undoubtedly 
mixed up with it, and the severe self-restraint of the native 
school disappeared, or was caricatured by antiquarian imitators. 
The great nurse of Roman eloquence was Freedom ; when that 
was lost, eloquence sank, and while that existed, the mere lack 
of technical dexterity cannot have greatly abated from the real 
power of the speakers. 

The subject which the Romans wrought out for themselves 
with the least assistance from Greek thought, was Jurisprudence. 
In this they surpassed not only the Greeks, but all nations 
ancient and modern. From the early formulae, mostly of a religious 
character, which existed in the regal period, until the publication 
of the Decemviral code, conservatism and progress went hand in 
hand.i After that epoch elementary legal knowledge began to 
be diffused, though the interpretation of the Twelve Tables was 
exclusively in the hands of the Patricians. But the limitation of 
the judicial power by the establishment of a fixed code, and the 
obligation of the magistrate to decide according to the written 
letter, naturally encouraged a keen study of the sources which 

^ A good essay on this subject is to be found in "Wordswortu's Fragments 
p. 680, sqq. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 35 

in later times expanded into the splendid developments of 
Eoman legal science. The first institution of the table of 
legis actioneSj attributed to Appius Claudius (304 B.C.), must be 
considered as the commencement of judicial knowledge proper. 
The responsa prudentium, at the giving of which younger men 
were present as listeners, must have contributed to form a legal 
habit of thought among the citizens, and prepared a vast mass 
of material for the labours of the philosophic jurists of a later 
age. 

But inasmuch as neither speeches nor legal decisions were gene- 
rally committed to writing, except in the bare form of registers, 
we do not find that there was any growth of regular prose com- 
position. The rule that prose is posterior to poetry holds good in 
Eome, in spite of the essentially prosaic character of the people. 
It has been already said that religious, legal, and other formulas were 
arranged in rhythmical fashion, so as be known by the name of 
carmina. And conformably to this we see that the earliest com- 
posers of history, who are in point of time the first prose writers 
of Eome, did not write in Latin at all, but in Greek. The history 
of Latin prose begins with Cato. He gave it that peculiar 
colouring which it never afterwards entirely lost. Having now 
completed our preliminary remarks, we shall proceed to a more 
detailed account of the earliest writers whose jiames or works 
have come down to us. 



CHAPTER IIL 

The Introduction of Greek Literature — ^Lrvius and 
IsTaevius (240-204 b.c.). 

It is not easy for us to realise the effect produced on tlie Eomans 
by their first acquaintance with Greek civilisation. The debt 
incurred by English theology, philosophy, and music, to Germany, 
offers but a faint parallel. If we add to this our obligations 
to Italy for painting and sculpture, to France for mathe- 
matical science, popular comedy, and the culture of the salon, 
to the Jews for finance, and to other nations for those town 
amusements which we are so slow to invent for ourselves, we 
shall still not have exhausted or even adequately illustrated the 
multifarious influences shed on every department of Eoman 
life by the newly transplanted genius of Hellas. It was not that 
she merely lent an impulse or gave a direction to elements already 
existing. She did this; but she did far more. She kindled 
into life by her fruitful contact a literature in prose and verse 
which flourished for centuries. She completely undermined 
the general belief in the state religion, substituting for it the 
fair creations of her finer fancy, or when she did not substitute, 
blending the two faiths together with sympathetic skill; she 
entwined herself round the earliest legends of Italy, and so 
moulded the historical aspirations of Rome that the great patrician 
came to pride himself on his own ancestral connection with Greece, 
and the descent of his founder from the race whom Greece had 
conquered. Her philosophers ruled the speculations, as her artists 
determined the aesthetics, of all Roman amateurs. Her physicians 
held for centuries the exclusive practice of scientific medicine ; 
while in music, singing, dancing, to say nothing of the lighter or 
less reputable arts of ingratiation, her professors had no rivals. 
The great field of education, after the break up of the ancient 
system, was mainly in Greek hands; while her literature and 
language were so familiar to the educated Roman that in hia 



uvius. 87 

moments of intensest feeling it was generally in some Greek 
apophthegm that he expressed the passion which moved him.^ 

It would, therefore, be scarcely too much to assert that in 
every field of thought (except that of law, where Eome remained 
strictly national) the Eoman intellect was entirely under the 
ascendancy of the Greek. There are, of course, individual excep- 
tions. Men like Cato, Varro, and in a later age perhaps Juvenal, 
could understand and digest Greek culture without thereby losing 
their peculiarly Eoman ways of thought; but these patriots in 
literature, while rewarded with the highest praise, did not exert a 
proportionate influence on the development of the national mind. 
They remained like comets moving in eccentric orbs outside the 
regular and observed motion of the celestial system. 

The strongly felt desbe to know something about Greek litera- 
ture must have produced within a few years a pioneer bold enough 
to make the attempt, if the accident of a schoolmaster needing 
text-books in the vernacular for his scholars had not brought it 
about. The man who thus first clothed Greek poetry in a Latin 
dress, and who was always gratefully remembered by the Eomans 
in spite of his sorry performance of the task, was Livius An- 
DRONicus (285-204? b.c), a Greek from Tarentum, brought to Eome 
275 B.C., and made the slave probably of M. Livius Salinator. 
Having received his freedom, he set up a school, and for the benefit 
of his pupils translated the Odyssey into Saturnian verse. A few 
fragments of this version survive, but they are of no merit either 
from a poetical or a scholastic point of view, being at once bald 
and incorrect. 2 Cicero^ speaks slightingly of his poems, as also 
does Horace,* from boyish experience of their contents. It is 
curious that productions so immature should have kept their 
position as text-books for near two centuries ; the fact shows how 
conservative the Eomans were in such matters. 

Livius also translated tragedies from the Greek. We have the 
names of the Achilles, Aegisthus, Ajax, Andromeda^ Danae, EqutiS 
Trojanus, Tereiis, Hermione, Ino. In this sphere also he seems 
to have written from a commendable motive, to supply the popular 
want of a legitimate drama. His first play was represented in 
240 B.C. He himself followed the custom, universal in the early 
period,^ of acting in his own dramas. In them he reproduced 

^ Scipio quoted Homer when he saw the flames of Carthage rising. He is 
described as having been profoundly moved. And according to one report 
Caesar's last words, when he saw Brutus among his assassins, were koX ah 

TiKUOV. 

2 The reader will find them all in "Wordsworth. 

' Brut, xviii. 71, non dhyna sunt quxte itencv) Jeganhtr. 

* Ep. ii. 1, 69. ' s j^^^ y[i 2. 



38 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

some of tlie simpler Greek metres, especially the trocliaic ; and 
Terentianus Maurus^ gives from the Ino specimens of a curious ex- 
periment in metre, viz. the substitution of an iambus for a spondee 
in the last foot of a hexameter. As memorials of the old language 
these fragments present some interest; words like perhitere 
( = perire)y anculahant (= hauriebant), nefrendem { = infante'm), 
dusmus ( = dumosus), disappeared long before the classical period. 

His plodding industry and laudable aims obtained him the 
respect of the people. He was not only selected by the Pontifices 
to write the poem on the victory of Sena (207 B.c.),^ but was the 
means of acquiring for the class of poets a recognised position in 
the body corporate of the state. His name was handed down to 
later times as the first awakener of literary effort at Rome, but he 
hardly deserves to be ranked among the body of Eoman authors. 
The impulse which he had communicated rapidly bore fruit. 
Dramatic literature was proved to be popular, and a poet soon 
arose who was fully capable of fixing its character in the lines 
which its after successful cultivation mainly pursued. Cn. Naevius, 
(2 69^-204: B.C.) a Campanian of Latin extraction and probably not a 
Eoman citizen, had in his early manhood fought in the first Punic 
war.^ At its conclusion he came to Eome and applied himself to 
literary work. He seems to have brought out his first play as 
early as 235 B.C. His work mainly consisted of translations from 
the Greek ; he essayed both tragedy and comedy, but his genius 
inclined him to prefer the latter. Many of his comedies have 
Latin names, Dohis, Figvlus, Nautae, &c. These, however, were 
not togaiae but iKdliatae,^ treated after the same manner as 
those of Plautus, with Greek costumes and surroundings. His 
original contribution to the stage was the Praetexta, or national 
historical drama, which thenceforth established itself as a legiti- 
mate, though rarely practised, branch of dramatic art. We have 
the names of two Praetextae by him, Clastidiuni and Romulus 
or Allmonium Romuli et Remi. 

The style of his plays can only be roughly inferred from the 
few passages which time has spared us. That it was masculine 
and vigorous is clear ; we should expect also to fiad from the 
remarks of Horace as well as from his great antiquity, considerable 

1 19, 35. The lines are— 

"Etiam purpureo suras include cothunio, 
Altius et revocet volucres in pectore sinus : 
Pressaque iam j,Tavida crepitent tibi terga pharetra; 
Derige odorisequos ad certa cubilia canes." 

In their present form these verses are obviously a century and a half at least 
later than Livius. 

2 Livy, xxvii. 37. 8 Qell. xvii. 21, 45. * See page 46. 



NAEVIUS. 39 

ronglmess. But on referring to the fragments we do not observe 
this. On the contra,ry, the style both in tragedy and comedy is 
simple, natural, and in good taste. It is certainly less laboured 
than that of Ennius, and though it lacks the "racy flavour of 
Plautus, shows no inferiority to his in command of the resources of 
the language. 1 On the whole, we are inclined to justify the people 
in their admiration for him as a genuine exponent of the strong 
native humour of his day, which the refined poets of a later age 
could not appreciate. 

Naevius did not only occupy himself with writing plays. He 
took a keen interest in politics, and brought himself into trouble 
by the freedom with which he lampooned some of the leading 
families. The Metelli, especially, were assailed by him, and it 
was probably through their resentment that he was sent to prison, 
where he solaced himself by composing two comedies. ^ Plautus, 
who was more cautious, and is by some thought to have had for 
ISTaevius some of the jealousy of a rival craftsman, alludes to this 
imprisonment : — " 

" Nam OS columnatum poetae esse indaudivi barbaro, 
Quoi bini custodes semper totis horis accubant." 

The poet, however, did not learn wisdom from experience. He 
lampooned the great Scipio in some spirited verses still extant, and 
doubtless made many others feel the shafts of his ridicule. Eut 
the censorship of literary opinion was very strict in Eome, and 
when he again fell under it, he was obliged to leave the city. He 
is said to have retired to Utica, where he spent the rest of his life 
and died (circ. 204 B.C.). It was probably there that he wrote 
the poem which gives him the chief interest for us, and the loss 
of which by the hand of time is deeply to be regretted. Debarred 
from the stage, he turned to his own military experience for a 
subject, and chose the first Punic war. He thus laid the founda- 
tion of the class of poetry known as the " National Epic," which 
received its final development in the hands of Virgil. The poem 

1 The reader may like to see one or two specimens, "We give one from 
tragedy (tlie Lycurgus) : 

" Vos qui regalis corporis custodias 
Agitatis, ite actutum in frundiferos locos, 
Ingenio arbusta ubi nata sunt, non obsita; " 

and one from comedy (the Tarentilla), the description of a coquette— 

" Quasi pila 
In choro ludens datatim dat se et conununem facit; 
Alii adnutat, alii adnictat, alium amat, alium tenet. 
Alibi manus e=;t occupata, alii percellit Tiedcm, 
Anulum alii dat spectandum, a labris alium invocat, 
Alii cantat, attamen alii suo dat digito literas." 

2 The Eariolus and Leo. ^ Mil. Glor. 211. 



40 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

was written in Saturnian verse, perhaps from a patriotic motive ; 
and was not divided into books until a century after the poet's 
death., when the grammarian Lampadio arranged it in seven books, 
assigning two to the mythical relations of Rome and Carthage, and 
the remainder to the history of the war. The narrative seems to 
have been vivid, truthful, and free from exaggerations of language. 
The legendary portion contained the story of Aeneas's visit to Car- 
thage, Avhich Virgil adopted, besides borrowing other single inci- 
dents. What fragments remain are not. very interesting and do 
not enable us to pronounce any judgment. But Cicero's epithet 
^^luculente scripsit"^ is sulGficient to show that he highly appre- 
ciated the poet's powers ; and the popularity which he obtained 
in his life-time and for centuries after his death, attests his capacity 
of seizing the national modes of thought. He had a high opinion 
of himself ; he held himself to be the champion of the old Italian 
school as opposed to the Graecising innovators. His epitaph is 
very characteristic i^ 

** Mortales immortal es si foret fas flere, 
Flerent Divae Carnenae Naeviura poetam. 
Itaque postquamst Orcino traditus thesauro 
ObUti sunt Komae loquier Latina lingua." 

1 Brut. 19, 75. 

2 If immortals might weep for mortals, the divine Camenae would weep 
for Naevius the poet ; thus it is that now he has been delivered into the 
treasure-house of Orcus, men have forgotten at Kome how to speak the 
Latin tongue. 



CHAPTEE IV. 

ROMAN COMEDY PLAUTUS TO TURPILIUS (254-103 B.O.). 

Before entering upon any criticism of the comic authors, it will 
be weU to make a few remarks on the general characteristics of the 
Eoman theatre. Theatrical structures at Eome resembled on the 
whole those of Greece, from which they were derived at first 
through the medium of Etruria/ but afterwards directly from the 
great theatres which Magna Graecia possessed in abundance. Un- 
like the Greek theatres, however, those at Eome were of wood 
not of stone, and were mere temporary erections, taken down im- 
mediately after being used. On scaffoldings of this kind the plays 
of Plautus and Terence were performed. Even during the last 
period of the Eepublic, wooden theatres were set up, sometimes 
on a scale of profuse expenditure little consistent with their 
duration. 2 An attempt was made to build a permanent stone 
theatre, 135 B.C., but it was defeated by the Consul Scipio Nasica.^ 

The credit of building the first such edifice is due to Pompey 
(55 B.C.), who caused it to have accommodation for 40,000 spec- 
tators. Vitruvius in his fifth book explains the ground-plan of 
such buildings. They were almost always on the same model, 
differing in material and size. On one occasion two whole theatres 
of wood, placed back to back, were made to turn on a pivot, and 
so being united, to form a single amphitheatre.* In construction, 
the Eoman theatre differed from the Greek in reserving an arc not 
exceeding a semicircle for the spectators. The stage itself was 
large and raised not more than five feet. But the orchestra, instead 
of containing the chorus, was filled by senators, magistrates, and 

^ See Livy, vii, 2. 

2 The most celebrated was that erected by Scaurus in his aedileship 58 
B.C., an almost incredible description of which is given by Pliny, N. H. xxxvi. 
12. See Diet. Ant. Theatrum, whence this is taken. 

^ A teni])orary stone theatre was probably erected for the Apollinarian 
Games, 179 B.C. If so, it was soon pulled down ; a remarkable instance 
of the determination of the Senate not to encourage dramatic performances. 

* Done by Curio, 60 B.C. 



42 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

distinguished guests. ^ This made it easier for the Romans to dis- 
pense with a chorus altogether, which we find, as a rule, they did. 
The rest of the people sat or stood in the great semicircle behind 
that which formed the orchestra. The order in which they placed 
themselves was not fixed by law until the later years of the 
Republic, -and again, with additional safeguards, in the reign of 
Augustus. 2 But it is reasonable to suppose that the rules of pre- 
cedence were for the most part voluntarily observed. 

It would appear that in the earliest toeatres there were no tiers 
of seats (cunei), but merely a semicircle of sloping soil, banked up 
for the occasion (cavea) on which those who had brought seats sat 
down, while the rest stood or reclined. The stage itself is called 
pulpUitm or proscaeniuin, and the decorated background scaena. 
"Women and children were allowed to be present from the earliest 
period ; slaves were not,^ though it is probable that many came 
by the permission of their masters. The position of poets and 
actors was anything but reputable. The manager of the company 
was generally at best a freedman ; and the remuneration given by 
the Aediles, if the piece was successful, was very small ; if it 
failed, even that was withheld. The behaviour of the audience was 
certainly none of the best. Accustomed at all times to the enjoy- 
ment of the eye rather than the ear, the Romans were always impa- 
tient of mere dialogue. Thus Terence tells us that contemporary 
poets resorted to various devices to produce some novel spectacle, 
and he feels it necessary to explain why he himself furnishes nothing 
of the kmd. Fair criticism could hardly be expected from so motley 
an assembly ; hence Terence begs the people in each case to listen 
carefully to his play and then, and not till then, if they disapprove, 
to hiss it off the stage.* In the times of Plautus and Ennius the 
spectators were probably more discriminating ; but the steady 
depravation of the spectacles furnished for their amusement con- 
tributed afterwards to brutalise them with fearful rapidity, until 
at the close of the Republican period dramatic exhibitions were 
thought nothing of in comparison with a wild-beast fight or a 
gladiatorial show. 

At first, hov/ever, comedy was decidedly a favourite with the 
people, and for one tragic poet whose name has reached us there 
are at least five comedians. Of the three kinds of poetry culti- 
vated in this early period, comedy, which, according to Quintilian^ 
was the least successful, has been much the most fortunate. For 
whereas we have to form our opinion of Roman tragedy chiefly 

^ Primus suhselliomm ordo. ^ Otho's Law, 68 B.C. 

3 See Mommsen, Bk. iii. ch. xv. * See proL to Andria. 

* Quiut. X. 1, Comoedia maxime clavdicarmis. 



EOMAN COMEDY — PLA0TUS. 43 

from tlie testimony of ancient authors, we can estimate tlie value of 
Eoman comedy from the ample remains of its two greatest masters. 
The plays of Plautus are the most important for this purpose. 
Independently of their greater talent, they give a truer picture of 
Eoman manners, and reflect more accurately the popular taste and 
level of culture. It is from them, therefore, that any general re- 
marks on Eoman comedy would naturally be illustrated. 

Comedy, being based on the fluctuating circumstances of real 
life, lends itself more easily than tragedy to a change of form. 
Hence, while tragic art after once passing its prime slowly but 
steadily declines, comedy seems endued with greater vitality, and 
when politics and religion are closed to it, readily contents itself 
with the less ambitious sphere of manners. Thus, at Athens, 
Menander raised the new comedy to a celebrity little if at aU inferior 
to the old ; while the form of art which he created has retained 
its place in modern literature as perhaps the most enduring which 
the drama has assumed. In Eome there was far too little liberty 
of speech for the Aristophanic comedy to be possible. Outspoken 
attacks in public on the leading statesmen did not accord with 
the senatorial idea of government. Hence such poets as possessed 
a comic vein were driven to the only style which could be culti- 
vated with impunity, viz. that of Philemon and Menander. But 
a difficulty met them at the outset. The broad allusions and 
rough fun of Aristophanes Avere much more intelligible to a Eoman 
public than the refined criticism and quiet satKe of Menander, 
even supposing the poet. able to reproduce these. The author who 
aspired to please the public had this problem before him, — while 
taking the Middle and New Comedy of Athens for his model, to 
adapt them to the coarser requirements of Eoman taste and the 
national rather than cosmopolitan feeling of a Eoman audience, 
without drawing down the wrath of the government by im- 
prudent political allusions. 

It was the success with which Plautus fulfilled these conditions 
that makes him pre-eminently the comic poet of Eome ; and which, 
though purists aftected to depreciate him,^ excited the admiration 
of such men as Cicero, ^ Varro, and Sisenna, and secured the unin- 
terrnpted representation of his plays until the fourth century of 
the Empire. 

The life of Plautus, which extended from 254 to 184 b.o. 
presents little . of interest. His name used to be written M. 

1 Hor. Ep. ii. 1, 170. 

•' At vestri proavi Plautinos et numeros et 
Laurtavere sales : nimium patienter utrumquo 
Ne rlicam stulte miratL" 

2 De OflF. i. 29, 104. 



44 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

Accius, but is now, on tlie anthority of tlie Ambrosian MS. 
changed to T. Maccius Plautus. He was by birtb an Umbrian 
from Sassina, of free parents, but poor. We are told by Gelliusi 
that be made a small fortune by stage decorating, but lost it 
by rash investment ; be was tben reduced to labouriug for some 
years in a corn mill, but having employed his spare time in writing, 
he established a sufficient reputation to be able to devote the rest 
of his life to the pursuit of his art. He did not, however, form a 
high conception of his responsibility. The drudgery of manual 
labour and the hardships under which he had begun his literary 
career were imfavourable to the finer susceptibilities of an enthusi- 
astic nature. So long as the spectators applauded he was satisfied. 
He was a prolific writer ; 130 plays are attributed to him, but their 
genuineness was the subject of discussion from a very early period. 
Varro finally decided in favour of only 21, to which he added 19 
more as probably genuine, the rest he pronoimced uncertaiu. We 
may joia him in regardiug it as very probable that the plays falsely 
attributed to Plautus were productions of his own and the next 
generation, which for business reasons the managers allowed to pass 
under the title of " Plautine." Or, perhaps, Plautus may have given 
a few touches and the benefit of his great name to the plays of his 
less celebrated contemporaries, much as the great Italian painters 
used the services of their pupils to multiply their own works. 

Of the 20 plays that we possess (the entire Varronian list, ex- 
cept the Vidularia, which was lost in the Middle Ages) all have the 
same general character, mth the siugle exception of the AmpMtruo. 
This is more of a burlesque than a comedy, and is full of humour. 
It is founded on the well-worn fable of Jupiter and Alcmena, and 
has been imitated by Moliere and Dryden. Its source is uncertain; 
but it is probably from Archippus, a writer of the old comedy (415 
B.C.). Its form suggests rather a development of the Satyric drama. 

The remaining plays are based on real life ; the real life that 
is pourtrayed by Menander, and by no means yet established in 
Eome, though soon to take root there with far more disastrous con- 
sequences — the life of imbecile fathers made only to be duped, 
and spendthrift sons ; of jealous husbands, and dull mves ; of 
witty, cunning, and wholly unscrupidous slaves ; of parasites, lost 
to all self-respect ; of traffickers in vice of both sexes, sometimes 
cringing, sometimes threatening, but almost always outwitted by a 
duplicity superior to their own ; of members .of the demi-monde^ 
whose beauty is only equalled by their shameless venalitj'^, though 
some of them enlist our sympathies by constancy in love, others by 
unmerited sufferings (which, however, always end happily) ; and^ 

1 iii. 3, 14. 



PLAUTUS. 45 

finally, of an array of cooks, go-betweens, confidantes^ and nonde- 
scripts, who will do any thing for a dinner — a life, in short, that 
suggests a gloomy idea of the state into which the once manly and 
high-minded Athenians had sunk. 

It may, however, be questioned whether Plautus did not exceed 
his models in licentiousness, as he certainly fell below them in 
elegance. The drama has always been found to exercise a decided 
influence on public morals ; and at Eome, where there was no 
authoritative teaching on the subject, and no independent investi- 
gation of the foundations of moral truth, a series of brilliant plays, 
in which life was regarded as at best a dull affair, rendered tolerable 
by coarse pleasures, practical jokes, and gossip, and then only as 
long as the power of enjoyment lasts, can have had no good effect 
on the susceptible minds of the audience. The want of respect for 
age, again, so alien to old Roman feeling, was an element imported 
from the Greeks, to whom at all times the contemplation of old age 
presented the gloomiest associations. But it must have struck at 
the root of all Roman traditions to represent the aged father in any 
but a venerable light ; and inimitable as Plautus is as a humourist, 
we cannot regard him as one who either elevates his own art, or in 
any way represents the nobler aspect of the Roman mind. 

The conventional refinement with which Menander invested his 
characters, and which was so happily reproduced by Terence, was 
not attempted by Plautus. His excellence lies rather in the bold 
and natural flow of his dialogue, fuller, perhaps, of spicy humour 
and broad fun than of wit, but of humour and fun so lighthearted 
and spontaneous that the soberest reader is carried away by it. In 
the construction of his plots he shows no great originality, though 
often much ingenuity. Sometimes they are adopted without 
change, as that of the Trinummus from the ©rjcravpo^ of Philemon ; 
sometimes they are patched together^ from two or more Greek 
plays, as is probably the case with the Epidicus and Captivi ; 
sometimes they are so slight as to amount to little more than a peg 
on which to hang the witty speeches of the dialogue, as, for ex- 
ample, those of the Persa and CurcuUo. 

The Menaechmi and Trinummus are the best known of his 
plays ; the former would be hard to parallel for effective humour : 
the point on which the plot turns, viz. the resemblance between two 
pairs of brothers, which causes one to be mistaken for the other, 
and so leads to many ludicrous scenes, is familiar to all readers of 
Shakespeare from the Comedy of Errors. Of those plays which 

1 This process is called contamination. It was necessitated by the fond- 
ness of a Roman audience for plenty of action, and their indifference to mere 
dialogue. 



46 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

border on the sentimental the best is the Captivi, which the poet 
himself recommends to the audience on the score of its good moral 
lesson, adding with truth — 

•' Huiusmodi paucas poetae reperiunt comoedias 
Ubi boni meliores fiant." 

We are told^ that Plautus took the greatest pleasure in his Pseu- 
dolus, which was also the work of his old age. The Epidicus also 
must have been a favourite with him. There is an allusion to it 
in the Baccliides,^ which shows that authors then were as much. 
distressed by the incapacity of the actors as they are now. 

** Non herus sed actor raihi cor odio sauciat. 
Etiam Epidicum quarn ego fabulum aeque ac me ipsum amo 
Nullam aeque invitus specto, si agit Pellio." 

The prologues prefixed to nearly all the plays are interesting from 
their fidelity to the Greek custom, whereas those of Terence are 
more personal, and so resemble the modern prologue. In the former 
we see the arch insinuating pleasantry of Plautus employed for the 
purpose of ingratiating himself with the spectators, a result which, 
we may be sure, he finds little difficulty in achieving. Among 
the other plays, the Poenulus possesses for the philologist this- 
special attraction, that it contains a Phoenician passage, which, 
though rather carelessly transliterated, is the longest fragment 
we possess of that important Semitic language.^ All the Plautine 
plays belong to the Palliatae, i.e. those of which the entire 
surroundings are Greek, the name being taken from the Pallium or 
Greek cloak worn by the actors. There was, however, in the Italian 
towns a species of comedy founded on Greek models but national 
in dress, manners, and tone, known as Comoedia Togata, of which 
Titinius was the greatest master. The Amphitruo is somewhat 
difficult to class ; if, as has been suggested above, it be assigned to 
the old comedy, it will be a Palliaia. If, as others think, it be 
rather a specimen of the Wapo-rpayi^Ua,^ or RliinUiov.ica (so called 
from Rhinthon of Tarentum), it would form the only existing 
specimen of another class, called by the Greeks 'IraXiK^ /cw/xwSta. 
Horace speaks of Plautus as a follower of Epicharmus, and his 
plots were frequently taken from mythological subjects. With 
regard, however, to the other plays of Plautus, as well as those of 
Caecilius, Trabea, Licinius Imbrex, Luscius Lavinius, Terence and 
Turpilius, there is no ground for supposing that they departed 
from the regidar treatment of palliatae.^ 

1 Cic. de Sen. 50. 2 j,;. 2, 35. » Poen. v. 1. 

* Plautus himself calls it Tragico- comoedia. 

' We find in Donatus the term crepidata, which seems equivalent to 
palUatttt though it probably was extended to tragedy, which palliata 



PLAUTUS. ' 47 

Plautus is a complete master of tlie Latin language in its more 
colloquial forms. Whatever lie wishes to say he finds no 
difficulty in expressing without the least shadow of obscurity. 
His full, flowing style, his inexhaustible wealth of words, the 
pliancy which in his skilful hands is given to the comparatively 
rude instrument with which he works, are remarkable in the 
highest degree. In the invention of new words, and the fertility 
of his combinations, 1 he reminds us of Shakespeare, and far 
exceeds any other Latin author. But perhaps this faculty is not 
so much absent from subsequent writers as kept in check by them. 
They felt that Latin gained more by terse arrangement and exact 
fitness in the choice of existing terms, than by coining new ones 
after the Greek manner. Plautus represents a tendency, which, 
after him, steadily declines ; Lucretius is more sparing of new 
compounds than Ennius, Virgil than Lucretius, and after Virgil 
the age of creating them had ceased. 

It must strike every reader of Plautus, as worthy of note, that 
he assumes a certain knowledge of the Greek tongue on the part 
of his audience. Not only are many (chiefly commercial) terms 
directly imported from the Greek, as dica^ tarpessita^ log?', 
sycophantia, agoranomus, but a large number of Greek adjectives 
and adverbs are used, which it is impossible to suppose formed 
part of the general speech — e.g. thalassicus, euscheme, dulice, 
dapsilis : Greek puns are introduced, as, " opus est Chryso 
Chrysalo" in the Bacchides ; and in the Persa we have the 
following hybrid title of a supposed Persian grandee, " Vaniloqid- 
dorus Virginisvendonides Nugipolyloquides Argentiextevehronides 
Tedignilogaid.cs Nummorumexpalponides Quodsemelarrijpides Nun- 
quamposteareddides ! " 

Nevertheless, Plautus never uses Greek words in the way so 
justly condemned by Horace, viz. to avoid the trouble of thinking 
out the proper Latin equivalent. He is as free from this bad 
habit as Cato himself : all his Graecisms, when not technical 
terms, have some humourous point ; and, as far as we can judge, 
the good example set by him was followed by all his successors 
in the comic drama. Their superiority in this respect may be 
appreciated by comparing them with the extant fragments of 
Lucihus. 

apparently was not. Trdbeata, a term mentioned by Suet, in his Treatise 
de Grammat. seems = praetextata, at all events it refers to a play with national 
characters of an exalted rank. 

^ Kg. trahax, perenniservus, contortiplicati, parcipromus, prognariter, and 
a hundred others. In Pseud, i. 5 ; ii. 4, 22, we have xap'" rovru iroiu, i/a\ 
tfhp. Kal rovTo Sh, and other Greek modes of transition. Cf.Pers. ii. 1, 79. 



48 ■ HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

In his metres he follows the Greek systems, but somewhat 
loosely. His iambics admit spondees, &c. into all places but the 
last ; but some of his plays show much more care than others : 
the Persa and Stlclius being the least accurate, the Menaechmi 
peculiarly smooth and harmonious. The Trochaic tetrameter and 
the Cretic are also favourite rhythms ; the former is well suited 
to the Latin language, its beat being much more easily dis- 
tinguishable in a rapid dialogue than that of the Iambic. His 
metre is regulated partly by quantity, partly by accent ; but his 
quantities do not vary as much as has been supposed. The 
irregularities consist chiefly of neglect of the laws of position", of 
final long vowels, of inflexional endings, and of double letters, 
which last, according to some grammarians, were not used until 
the time of Ennius. His Lyric metres are few, and very im- 
perfectly elaborated. Those which he prefers are the Cretic and 
Bacchiac, though Dactylic and Choriambic systems are not wholly 
unknown. His works form a most valuable storehouse of old 
Latin words, idioms, and inflexions; and now that the most 
ancient MSS. have been scientifically studied, the true spelling 
of these forms has been re-established, and throws the greatest 
light on many important questions of philology.^ 

After Plautus the most distinguished writer of comedy was 
Statius Caecilius (219-166? b.c.), a native of Insubria, brought 
as a prisoner to Eome, and subsequently (we know not exactly 
when) manumitted. He began writing about 2 00 b. c. , when Plautus 
was at the height of his fame. He was, doubtless, influenced (as 
indeed could not but be the case) by the prestige of so great a master; 
but, as soon as he had formed his own style, he seems to have carried 
out a treatment of the originals much more nearly uesembling that 
of Terence. For while in Plautus some of the oddest incongruities 
arise from the continual intrusion of Eoman law-terms and other 
everyday home associations into the Athenian agora or dicasteries^ 
in Terence this effective but very inartistic source of humour is 
altogether discarded, and the comic result gained solely by the 
legitimate methods of incident, character, and dialogue. That 
this stricter practice was inaugurated by Caecilius is probable, 
both from the praise bestowed on him in spite of his deficiency in 
purity of Latin style by Cicero, ^ and also from the evident 

' One needs but to mention forms Uke danunt, ministreis, kibus, sacres, 
posticJea dehibere, &c. and constructions like quicquam uti, istanc taction 
quid tute tecum? Nihil enim, and countless others, to understand the 
primary importance of Plautus's works for a historical s * "*^'' of the develop- 
ment of the Latin language. 

2 De Opt. Gen. Or. 1 ; cf. Att. vii. 3, 10. 



BOMAN COMEDY — CAECILIUS. 49 

admiration felt for hini by Terence. The prologue to the Hecyra 
proves (what we might have well supposed) that the earlier plays 
of such a poet had a severe struggle to achieve success.^ The 
actor, Ambivius Turpio, a tried servant of the public, maintains 
that his own perseverance had a great deal to do with the final 
victory of Caecilius ; and he apologises for bringing forward a 
play which had once been rejected, by his former success in 
similar circumstances. Horace implies that he maintained during 
the Augustan age the reputation of a dignified writer.^ Of the 
thirty-nine titles of his plays, by far the larger number are Greek, 
though a few are Latin, or exist in both languages. Those of 
Plautus and Naevius, it will be observed, are almost entirely 
Latin. This practice of retaining the Greek title, indicating, as 
it probably does, a closer adherence to the Greek style, seems 
afterwards to have become the regular custom. Li his later years 
Caecilius enjoyed great reputation, and seems to have been almost 
dictator of the Roman si -age, if we may judge from the story 
given by Suetonius in his life of Terence. One evening, he tells 
us, as Caecilius was at dinner, the young poet called on him, and 
begged for his opinion on the Andria, which he had just composed. 
Unknown to fame and meanly dressed, he was bidden to seat 
himself on a bench and read his work. Scarcely had he read a 
feAV verses, when Caecilius, struck by the excellence of the style, 
invited his visitor to join him at table ; and having listened to 
the rest of the play with admiration, at once pronounced a verdict 
in his favour. This anecdote, whatever be its pretensions to 
historical accuracy, represents, at all events, the conception enter- 
tained of Caecilius's position and influence as introducer of 
dramatic poets to the Eoman public. The date of his death is 
uncertain : he seems not to have attained any great age. 

The judgment of Caecilius on Terence was ratified by the 
people. When the Andria was first presented at the Megalesian 
games (166 B.C.) it was evident that a new epoch had arisen in 
Eoman art. The contempt displayed in it for all popular methods 
of acquiring applause is scarcely less wonderful than the formed 
style and mature view of life apparent in the poet of twenty-one 
years. 

It was received with favour, and though occasional failures 
afterwards occurred, chiefly through the jealousy of a rival poet, 

1 •'in eis .uas piimum Caecili didici novas 
Partim sum earum exactus, paitim vix stetL 

Perf eel lit spectarentur : ubi sunt cognitae 
Pla.itae sunt " - —Prol. 2, 14. 

- Hor. Ep. ii. 1, 59- Vliiccrc Caecilius gravitate. 

D 



50 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

the dramatic career of Terence may, nevertheless, be pronounced as 
brilliantly successful as it Avas sbortliyed. His fame increased with 
each succeeding play, till at the time of his early death, he found 
himseK at the head of his profession, and, in spite of petty rival- 
ries, enjoying a reputation almost equal to that of Plautus himself. 
The elegance and purity of his diction is the more remarkable 
as he was a Carthaginian by birth, and therefore spoke an idiom 
as diverse as can be conceived from the Latin in syntax, arrange- 
ment, and expression. He came ab a boy to Eome, where he lived 
as the slave of the senator Terentius Lucanus, by whom he was 
well educated and soon given his freedom. The best known fact 
about him is his intimate friendship with Scipio Africanus the 
younger, Laelius, and Furius, who were reported to have helped 
him in the composition of his plays. This rumour the poet 
touches on with great skill, neither admitting nor denying its 
truth, but handling it in such a way as reflected no discredit on 
himself and could not fail to be acceptable to the great men who 
were his patrons. ^ We learn from Suetonius that the belief 
strengthened with time. To us it appears most improbable that 
anything important was contributed by these eminent men. They 
mio-ht have given hints, and perhaps suggested occasional expres- 
sions, but the temptation to briag their names forward seems 
sufficiently to account for the lines in question, since the poet 
gained rather than lost by so doing. It has, however, been 
supposed that Scipio and his friends, desiring to elevate the 
popular taste, really employed Terence to effect this for them, 
their own position as statesmen preventing their coming forward 
in person as labourers in literature ; and it is clear that Terence 
has a very different object before him from that of Plautus. The 
latter cares only to please ; the former is not satisfied unless he 
instructs. And he is conscious that this endeavour gains him 
undeserved obloquy. All his prologues speak of bitter opposi- 
tion, misrepresentation, and dislike ; but he refuses to lower his 
high conception of his art. The people must hear his plays with 
attention, throw away their prejudices, and pronounce impartially 
on his merits. 2 He has such confidence in his own view that he 
does not doubt of the issue. It is only a question of time, and 

^ Adelph. prol. : 

" Nam quod isti dicunt malevoli, homines nobiles 
Hunc adiutare, assidueque una scribere; 
Quod illi maledictum veheinens existimant, 
Earn Imdeni hie ducit maximam : cum illis placet. 
Qui vobis univeisis et populo placcnt: 
Quorum opera in bello, in otio, in negotio 
Suo quisque tempore usus est sine superbia." 

2 See -Drol. to Andria. . 



ROMAN COMEDY— TETIENCE. 51 

if Ms contemporaries refuse to appreciate Mm, posterity will not 
fail to do so. This confidence was fully justified. Not only liis 
friends but the public amply recognised Ms genius ; and if men 
like Cicero, Horace, and Caesar, do not grant liim tbe highest 
creative power, they at least speak with admiration of his culti- 
vated taste. The criticism of Cicero is as discriminating as it is 
friendly : ^ 

" Tu quoque, qui solus lecto sermone, Terenti, 

Conversum expressnniquc Latina voce Menandrum 

In medio populi sedatis A'ocibus efiers ; 

Quidquid come loquens at que omnia dulcia dicens." 

Caesar, in a better known epigram, ^ is somewhat less compli- 
mentary, but calls him. jniri scrmonis amator ("a well of English 
imdefiled"). Varro praises Ms commencement of the Andria 
above its original in Menander; and if this indicates national 
partisanship, it is at least a testimony to the poet's posthumous 
fame. 

The modern character of Terence, as contrasted with Plautus, is 
less apparent in his language than in Ms sentiments. His Latin 
is substantially the same as that of Plautus, though he makes 
immeasurably fewer expermients with language. He never re- 
sorts to strange words, uncouth compounds, puns, or Graecisms for 
producing efil'ect ; ^ his diction is smooth and chaste, and even in- 
delicate subjects are alluded to without any violation of the pro- 
prieties ; indeed it is at first surprising that Avith so few appeals 
to the humourous instinct and so little witty dialogue, Terence's 
comic style should have received from the first such high commenda- 
tion. The reason is to be found in the circumstances of the time. 
The higher spirits at Eome were beginning to comprehend the drift 
of Greek culture, its subtle mastery over the passions, its humani- 
tarian character, its subversive influence. The protest against 
traditional exclusiveness begun by the great Scipio, and power- 
fully enforced by Ennius, was continued in a less heroic but not 
less efl'ective manner by the younger Scipio and his friends 
Lucdius and Terence. All the plays of Terence are Avritten with 
a purpose ; and the purpose is the same which animated the 
political leaders of free thought. To base conduct upon reason 
rather than tradition, and paternal authority upon kindness rather 
than fear ; * to give up the vain attempt to coerce youth into the 
narrow path of age ; to grapple with life as a whole by making 

1 Suet. Vit. Ter. 
■ 2 Tu quoque tu in summis, o dimiuiate Menander, poneris, &c. — lb. 

^ Possibly the following may be exceptions : — Audr. 218; Haut. 218, 356; 
Hec. 543. See Teuffel. 

•* See the first scene of the Adclphoe 



52 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

the best of eacli difficulty when it arises ; to live in comfort by 
means of mutual concession and not to plague ourselves with 
unnecessary troubles : such are some of the principles indicated in 
those plays of Menander which Terence so skilfully adapted, and 
whose lessons he set before a younger and more vigorous people. 
The elucidation of these principles in the action of the play, and 
the corresponding interchange of thought naturally awakened in 
the dialogue and expressed with studied moderation, ^ form the 
charm of the Terentian drama. In the bolder elements of 
dramatic excellence it must be pronouned deficient. There is not 
Menander's many-sided knowledge of the world, nor the racy 
drollery of Plautus, nor the rich humour of Moliere, nor the 
sparkling wit of Sheridan, — all is toned down with a severe self- 
lestraint, creditable to the poet's sense of propriety, but injurious 
to comic effect. His characters also lack variety, though power- 
fully conceived. They are easily classified ; indeed, Terence him- 
self summarises them in his prologue to the Eunuchus,'^ and as a 
rule is true to the distinctions there laid down. Another defect 
is the great similarity of names. There is a Clir ernes in four 
plays who stands for an old man in three, for a youth in one ; 
while the names Sostrafa, Sophrona, Bacchis, Aiitiplio, Hegio, 
Phaedna, Daviis, and Dromo, all occur in more than one piece. 
Thus we lose that close association of a name with a character, 
which is a most important aid towards lively and definite recol- 
lection. The characters become not so much individuals as 
impersonations of social or domestic relationships, though drawn, 
it is true, with a life-like touch. This defect, which is shared to a 
gi^eat extent by Plautus, is doubtless due to the imitative nature 
of Latin comedy. Menander's characters were analysed and 
classified by the critics, and the translator felt bound to keep to 
the main outlines of his model. It is said that Terence was not 
satisfied with his delineation of Greek life, but that shortly before 
his death he started on a voyage to Greece, to acquaint himself at 
first hand with the manners he depicted.^ This we can well 
believe, for even among Eoman poets Terence is conspicuous foi 
his striking realism. His scenes are fictitious, it is true, and his 
conversation is classical and refined, but both breathe the very 
spirit of real life. There is, at least, nothing either ideal or 
imaginative about them. The remark of Horace * that " Pom- 
ponius would have to listen to rebukes hke those of Demea if his 

^ MerptJrijs, the quality so much admired by the Greek critics, in which 
Horace may be compared with Terence. Cf. Aul. Gell. vi. (or vii.) 14, 6. 
M. 37, sqq. 3 s^iet Vit. Ter. 

* Sat. 1, 4, .53, referring to the scene in the Addiiihoc. 



EOMA^ COMEDY — TERENCE. 53 

father were living ; that if you broke up the elegant rhythmical 
language you would find only what every angry parent would 
say under the same circumstances," is perfectly just, and constitutes 
one of the chief excellences of Terence, — one which has made 
him, like Horace, a favourite with experienced men of the world. 

Terence as a rule does not base his play upon a single Greek 
original, but levies contributions from two or more, and exercises 
Lis talent in harmonising the different elements. This process is 
known as contamination ; a word that first occurs in the prologue 
to the Andria, and indicates an important and useful principle in 
imitative dramatic literature. The ground for this innovation is 
given by W. Wagner as the need felt by a Eoman audience for 
a quick succession of action, and their impatience of those subtle 
dialogues which the Greeks had so much admired, and which in 
most Greek plays occupy a somewhat disproportionate length. The 
dramas in which " contamination " is most successfully used are, 
the Eimuchus, Andria, and Adclplioe ; the last-mentioned being the 
only instance in which the two models are by different authors, vi';. 
the 'A8eA.<^ot of Menander and the ^waTro^i/rJo-Kovres of Dijhilus. 
So far as the metre and language went, Terence seems to have 
followed the Greek much more closely than Plautus, as was to 
be expected from his smaller inventive power. Quintilian, in 
commending him, expresses a wish that he had confined himself 
to the trimeter iambic rhythm. To us this criticism is somewhat 
obscure. Did the Eomans require a more forcible style when the 
long iambic or the trochaic was employed % or is it the weakness 
of his metrical treatment that Quintilian complains of % Certainly 
the trochaics of Terence are less clearly marked in their rhythm 
than those of Ennius or Plautus. 

Terence makes no allusion by name to any of his contemporaries -} 
but a line in the Andria'^ is generally sujjposed to refer to 
Caecilius, and to indicate his friendly feeling, somewhat as Virgil 
indicates his admiration for Ennius in the opening of the third 
Georgic.^ And the ^^vetus poetaj'^ (Luscius Lavinius) or "quidam 
malevoli,'^ are alluded to in all the prologues as trying to injure his 
fame. His first play was produced in the year that Caecihus died, 

^ Except in the prologues to the Eun. and Hecyra. 

2 805, "w^ quimios " aiunt, " quando ut volumus n(^ licet.'* The hne ot 
Caecilius is " Vivas ut;possis quavdo non quis ut velis." 

3 Georg. iii. 9. 

" Tentanda via est qua me quoque possim 
Toll ere humo victorque virum volitare per ora." 

He expresses his aspiration after immortaUty in the same terms that Enniiui 
had employed. 



54 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

166 B.C. ; the Hecyra next year ; tlie Hauton Timorumenos in 163 ; 
the Eunuchus and Phormio in 161 ; the Adelphoe in 160 ; and in 
the following year the poet died at the age of twenty-six, while 
sailing round the coast of Greece. The maturity of mind shown 
by so young a man is very remarkable. It must be remembered 
that he belonged to a race whose faculties developed earlier than 
among the Eomans, that he had been a slave, and was therefore 
familiar with more than one aspect of hfe, and that he had enjoyed 
the society of the greatest in Eome, who reflected profoundly on 
social and political questions. His influence, though imperfectly 
exercised in his lifetime, increased after his death, not so much 
through the representation as the reading of his plays. His 
language became one of the chief standards of classical Latin, and 
is regarded by Mr Munro as standing on the very highest level 
— the same as that of Cicero, Caesar, and Lucretius. His moral 
character was assailed soon after his death by Porcius Licinius, 
but probably without good grounds. More might be said against 
the morality of his plays — the morality of accommodation, as it is 
called by Mommsen. There is no strong grasp of the moral prin- 
ciple, but decency and propriety should be respected ; if an error 
has been committed, the best way is, if possible, to find out that 
it was no error after all, or at least to treat it as such. In no point 
does ancient comedy stand further apart from modern ideas than 
in its view of married life ; the wile is invariably the duU legal 
partner, love for whom is hardly thought of, while the sentiment 
of love (if indeed it be worthy of the name) is reserved for the 
Bacchis and Thais, who, in the most popular plays turn out to be 
Attic citizens, and so are finally united to the fortunate lover. 

But defective and erroneous as these views are, we must not 
suppose that Tereoce tries to make vice attractive.' On the con- 
trary, he distinctly says that it is usefid to know things as they 
really are for the purpose of learning to choose the good and 
reject the evil.^ Moreover, his lover is never a mere profligate, 
but proves the reality of his affection for the victim of his wrong- 
doing by his readiness and anxiety in all cases to become her 
husband. 

Terence has suggested many modern subjects. The Eunuchiis 
is reflected in the Bellamira of Sir Charles Sedley and Le Muet 
of Brueys ; the AdeljjJii in Moliere's Ecole des Maris and Baron's 
VEcole des Peres ; and the Phormio in Moliere's Les Fourherics 
de Scapin. 

AVe need do no more than just notice the names of Luscius 

* Eun. V. iv. 



ROMAN COMEDY — TOGATAE. 65 

Lavinius,^ the older rival and detractor of Terence ; Atilius, whose 
style is characterised by Cicero^ as extremely harsh ; Trabea, who, 
like Atilius, was a contemporary of Caecilius, and Licinius Imbrex, 
who belonged to the older generation ; Turpilius, Juventius, and 
Valerius,^ who lived to a considerably later period. The former 
died as late as 103 B.C., having thus quite outlived the productive- 
ness of the legitimate dramatic art. He seems to have been 
hvelier and more popular in his diction than Terence ; it is to te 
regretted that so httle of him remains. 

The earliest cultivation of the national comedy {togataY seems 
to date from after the death of Terence. Its first representative 
is TiTiNius, about whom we know little or nothing, except that he 
based his plays on the Attic comedy, changing, however, the scene 
and the costumes. The pieces, according to Mommsen, were laid 
in Southern Latium, e.g. Setia, Ferentinum, or Velitrae, and de- 
lineated with peculiar freshness the life of these busy little towns. 
The titles of his comedies are — Caecus, Fullones, Hortensim, 
Quintus, Varus, Gemina, lurisperita, Prilia, Privigna, Psaltria, 
Setina, Tihidna, Veliterna, Ulubrana. From these we should 
infer that his peculiar excellence lay in satirizing the weak- 
nesses of the other sex. As we have before implied, this type of 
comedy originally arose in the country towns and maintained a 
certain antagonism with the Graecized comedy of Eome. In a few 
years, however, we find it estabhshed in the city, under T. 
QuiNTius Atta and L. Afranius. Of the former little is known ; of 
the latter we know that he was esteemed the chief poet of togatae, 
and long retained his hold on the public. Quintilian^ recognises 
his talent, but condemns the morality of his plays. Horace speaks 
of him as wearing a gown which would have fitted Menander, but 
this is popular estimation, not his ovm judgment. Nevertheless, 
we may safely assert that the comedies of Afranius and Titinius, 
though often grossly indecent, had a thoroughly rich vein of native 
humour, which would have made them very valuable indications 
of the average popular culture of their day. 

^ Or " Lannvinus." Those who wish to know the inartistic expedients to 
which he resorted to gain applause should read the prologues of Terence, 
which are most valuable materials for literary criticism. 

^ Att. xiv. 20, 3. 

3 Teuffel 103. 

4 Sometimes called Tahemaria, Diomed iii. p. 488, though, strictly speak- 
ing, this denoted a lower and more provincial type. 

5 X. 1, 100. 



CHAPTER V. 

EoMAN Teagedy (Ennius — ^Accius, 239-94 b.o.). 

As the Italian talent for impromptu buffoonery might perhaps 
have in time created a genuine native comedy, so the power- 
ful and earnest rhetoric in which the deeper feelings of the 
Koman always found expression, might have assumed the tragic 
garb and woven itself into happy and original alliance with the 
dramatic instinct. But what actually happened was different. 
Tragedy, as well as comedy, took its subjects from the Greek ; but 
though comedy had the advantage of a far greater popularity, and 
also of a partially native origin, there is reason to believe that 
tragedy came the nearer of the two to a really national form of 
art. In the fullest and noblest sense of the Avord Eome had 
indeed no national drama ; for a drama, to be truly representative, 
must be based on the deepest chords of patriotic and even religious 
feeling. And that golden age of a people's history when Patriotism 
and Keligion are still wedded together, seeming but varying reflec- 
tions from the mirror of national life, is the most favourable of 
all to the birth of dramatic art. In Greece this was pre-eminently 
the case. The spirit of patriotism is ever present — ^rarely, indeed, 
suggesting, as in the Persae of Aeschylus, the subject of the play, 
but always supplying a rich background of common sympathy 
where poet and people can feel and rejoice together. Still more, 
if possible, is the religious spirit present, as the animating influ- 
ence which gives the drama its interest and its vitality. The 
great moral and spiritual questions which occupy the soul of man, 
in each play or series of plays, try to work out their own solu- 
tion by the natural human action of the characters, and by 
those reflections on the part of the chorus to which the action 
naturally gives rise. But with the transplanted tragedy of 
the Eomans this could no longer be the case. The religious 
ideas which spoke straight to the Athenian's heart, spoke only 
to the acquired learning of the Eoman. The idea of man, himself 
free, struggling with a destiny which he could not comprehend 



ROMAN TRAGEDY. 57 

or avert, is foreign to the Eoman conception of life. As 
Schlegel has observed, a truly Eoman tragic drama would have 
found an altogether different basis. The binding force of " Eeligio," 
constraining the individual to surrender himseK for the good of 
the Supreme State, and realising itself in acts of patriotic self- 
devotion; such would have been the shape we should have 
expected Eoman tragedy to take, and if it failed to do this, 
we should not expect it in other respects to be a great success. 

The strong appreciation which, notwithstanding its initial 
defects, tragedy did meet with and retain for many generations, 
is a striking testimony to the worth and talent of the men who 
introduced it. Their position as elevators of the popular taste 
was not the less real because they themselves were men of 
provincial birth, and only partially polished minds. Both hi 
the selection of their models and in the freedom of treating them 
they showed that good sense which was characteristic of the 
nation. As a rule, instead of trying to familiarise the people 
with Aeschylus and Sophocles, poets Avho are essentially Athenian, 
they generally chose the freethinking and cosmopoHtan Euripides, 
who was easily intelligible, and whose beauties did not seem so 
entirely to defy imitation. What Euripides was to Greek tragedy 
Menander was to comedy. Both denationalised then' respective 
fields ot poetry; both thereby acquired a vast ascendancy over 
the Eoman mind, ready as it was to be taught, and only awaiting 
a teacher whose views it .could understand. Now although Livius 
ac;>ually introduced, and Naevius continued, the translation of 
tragedies from the Greek, it was Ennius who first rendered them 
with a definitely conceived purpose. This purpose was — to raise 
the aesthetic sense of his countrymen, to set before them examples 
of heroic virtue, and, above all, to enlighten their minds with 
what he considered rational views on subjects of morals and 
and religion ; though, after all, the fatal facihty with which the 
sceptical theories of Euripides were disseminated and embraced 
was hardly atoned for by the gain to culture which undoubtedly 
resulted from the tragedian's labours. Mommsen says with 
truth that the stage is in its essence anti-Eoman, just as culture 
itself is anti-Eoman; the one because it consumes time and 
int(irest on things that interfere with the serious business of life, 
the other because it creates degrees of intellectual position where 
the constitution intended that all should be alike. But amid the 
vast change that came over the Eoman habits of thought, which 
men like Cato saw, resisted, and bewailed, it mattered little 
whether old traditions were violated. The stage at once became 
a powerful engine of popular education ; and it rested with the 



58 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

poet to decide whether it should elevate or degrade. Political 
interests, it is true, were carefully guarded. The police system, 
with which senatorial narrowness environed the stage as it did 
all corporations or voluntary societies, rigidly repressed and made 
penal anything like liberty of speech. But it was none the less 
possible to inculcate the stern Eoman virtues beneath the mask of 
an Ajax or Ulysses ; and Sellar has brought out with singular 
clearness in his work on the poets of the EepubHc the national 
features which are stamped on this early tragedy, making it in 
spite of its imperfections worthy of the great Kepublic. 

The oratorical mould in which all Latin poetry except satire 
and comedy is to a great extent cast, is visible from the beginning 
in tragedy. Weighty sentences follow one another until the moral 
eflect is reached, or the description fully turned. The rhythm 
seems to have been much more often trochaic^ than iambic, at 
least than trimeter iambic, for the tetrameter is more frequently 
employed. This is not to be wondered at, since even in comedy, 
where such high-flown cadences are out of place, the people liked 
to hear them, measuring excellence by stateliness of march rather 
than propriety of diction. 

The popular demand for grandiloquence Ennius (209-169 b.c.) 
was well able to satisfy, for he had a decided leaning to it himself, 
and great skill in attaining it. Moreover he had a vivid power of 
reproducing the original emotion of another. That reflected fer- 
vour Avhich draAYS passion, not direct from nature, but from nature 
as mirrored in a great work of art, stamps Ennius as a genuine 
Eoman in talent, while it removes him from the list of creative 
poets. The chief sphere of his influence was epic poetry, but in 
tragedy he founded a school which only closed when the drama 
itself was silenced by the bloody massacres of the civil wars. 
Born at Eudiae in Calabria, and so half Greek, half Oscan, he 
served while a young man in Sardinia, where he rose to the rank 
of centurion, and was soon after brought to Eonie by Cato. 
There is something striking in the stern reactionist thus intro- 
ducing to Eome the man Tvho was more instrumental than any 
other in overthrowing his hopes and fixing the new culture 
beyond possibility of recal. ^Tien settled at Eome, Ennius 
gained a living by teaching Greek, and translating plays for the 
stage. He also wrote miscellaneous poems, and among them a pane- 
gyric on Scipio which brought him into favourable notice. His 
fame must have been established before B.C. 189, for in that 
year Fulvius Nobilior took him into Aetolia to celebrate his deeds 

^ Quadrati versus. Gell, ii. 29. 



ROMAN TRAGEDY — ENNIUS. 59 

a proceeding which Cato strongly hut ineffectually impugned. In 
184 B.C., the Eoman citizenship was conferred on him. He alludes 
to this with pride in his annals — 

** Nos sumus Komani qui fuvimus ante Rudini." 

During the last twenty years of his life his friendship with 
Scipio and Pulvius must have ensured him respect and sympathy 
as well as freedom from distasteful labour. But he was never in 
atiluent circumstances ; ^ partly through his own fault, for he was 
a free liver, as Horace tells us^ — 

" Ennius ipse pater nunquam nisi potus ad arma 
Prosiluit dicenda ;" 

and he himself alludes to his lazy habits, saying that he never 
wrote poetry unless confined to the house by gout.^ He died in 
the seventieth year of his age and was buried in the tomb of the 
Scipios, where a marble statue of him stood between those of P. 
and L. Scipio. 

Ennius is not merely " the Father of Eoman Poetry ; " he held 
also as a man a peculiar and influential position, which we cannot 
appreciate without connecting liim with his patron and friend, 
the great Scipio Africanus. I^early of an age, united by common 
tastes and a common spiritual enthusiasm, these two distinguished 
mcu wrought together for a common object. Their familiarity 
with Greek culture and knowledge of Greek religious ideas 
seem to have filled both with a high sense of their position as 
teachers of their countrymen. Scipio drew around him a circle 
of aristocratic hberals. Ennius appealed rather to the people at 
large. The policy of the elder Scipio was continued' by his 
adopted son with far less breadth of view, but with more 
refined taste, and more concentrated effort. "Where Africanus 
would have sought liis inspiration from the poetry, Aemihanus 
went rather to the philosophy, of Greece ; he was altogether of a 
colder teinperamont, just as his literary friends Terence and 
LuciUiis were by nature less ardent than Ennius. Between them 
they laid the foundation of that broader conception of civilisation 
which is expressed by the significant word liumanitas. and which 
had borne its intellectual fruit when the whole people raised a 
shout of applause at the hne in the Hautontimorumenos — 

" Homo sum: bumani nihil a me alienum puto." 
This conception, trite as it seems to us, was by no means so when 
it was thus proclaimed : if philosophers had understood it {airas 
avOpoiTTO's avOp(i)7rio oIk€2ov kol (jiWov. — Ar. Eth. N. lib. 9), they 

^ Cic. de Sen. 5, 14. ^ Ep. I. xix. 7. ^ Nunquam poetor nisi podager. 



60 HISTORY OF RO.MAN LITERATURE. 

had never made it a principle of action ; and the teachers who 
had caused even the uneducated Eoman populace to recognise its 
speculative truth must be allowed to have achieved something 
great. Some historians of Eome have seen in this attitude a 
dechne from old Roman exclusiveness, almost a treasonable con- 
spiracy against the Eoman idea of the State. Hence they 
have regarded Ennius with something of that disfavour which 
Cato in his patriotic zeal evinced for him. The justification of 
the poet's course, if it is to be sustained at all, must be sought in 
the necessity for an expansion of national views to meet the exi- 
gences of an increasing foreign empire. External coercion might 
for a time suffice to keep divergent nationalities together ; but the 
only durable power would be one founded on sympathy with the 
subject peoples on the broad ground of a common humanity. 
And for this the poet and his patron bore witness with a consis- 
tent and solemn, though often irreverent, earnestness. Ennius 
had early in life shown a tendency towards the mystic specula- 
tions of Eythagoreanism : traces of it are seen in his assertion 
that the soul of Homer had migrated into him through a 
peacock, ^ and that he had three souls because he knew three 
languages ; ^ while the satirical notice of Horace seems to 
imply that he, like Scipio, regarded himself as specially favoured 
of heaven — 

** Leviter curare videtur 
Quo promissa cadant et somnia Pythagorea."* 

At the same time he studied the Epicurean system, and m par- 
ticular, the doctrines of Euhemerus, whose work on the origin of 
the gods he translated. His denial of Divine Erovidence is well 
knoAvn — * 

'* Ego deum genus esse dixi et dicam semper caelitum: 
Sad eos non curare opinor quid agat humanum genus. 
Nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest.* 

Of these two inconsistent points of view, the second, as we should 
expect in a nature so little mystical, finally prevailed, so that 
Ennius may well be considered the preacher of scepticism or the 
bold impugner of popular superstition according to the point of 
view which we assume. In addition to these philosophic aspira- 
tions he had a strong desire to reach artistic perfection, and to be 
the herald of a new literary epoch. Conscious of his success and 
proud of the power he wielded over the minds of the people, he 

^ Quintus Maeonide.^ pavone ex PytJiagoreo (Persius). 

2 Greek, Oscan, and Latin. ^ Ep. IL i. 52. 

* Fjaorment of the Tclamo. 



KOMAN TRAGEDY — ExNNIUS. 51 

alludes more tlian once to his performances in a self-congratu- 
latory strain — 

" Enni poeta salve, qni mortalilDUS 
Versus propinas flammeos medullitus.'* 
" Hail ! poet Ennius, who pledgest mankind in verses fiery to the 
heart's core." And with even higher confidence in his epitaph — 
" Aspicite, o cives, senis Enni imagini' formam: 
Hie vostrum panxit maxima facta patrum. 
Kemo me laciimis decoret ncc funera fletu 
Faxit. Cur ? vol! to vivu' per ora virum." 

"VVe shall illustrate the above remarks by quoting one or two 
passages from the fragments of his tragedies, which, it is true, are 
now easily accessible to the general reader, but nevertheless will 
not be out of place in a manual like the present, Avhich is intended 
to lead the student to study historically for himself the progress 
of the literature. The first is a dialogue between Hecuba and 
Cassandra, from the Alexander. Cassandra feels the prophetic 
impulse coming over her, the symptoms of which her mother 
notices with alarm : 

"Hec. 
" Sed quid oculis rabere visa es derepente ar dentibus? 
Ubi tua ilia paulo ante sapiens virginali' modestia ? 

Cas. 
Mater optumaram multo mulier melior mulieram, 
Missa sum superstitiosis ariolationibus. 
Namque Apollo fatis fandis dementem invitam ciret : 
Virgines aequales vereor, patris mei meum factum pudet, 
Optimi viri. Mea mater, tui me miseret, me piget: 
Optumam progeniem Priamo peperisti extra me: hoc dolet; 
Men obesse, illos prodesse, me obstare, illos obsequi I " 

She then sees the vision — 

" Adest adest fax obvoluta sanguine atque incendio! 
Multos annos latuit: cives ferte opem et restinguite! 
lamque man magno classis cita 
Texitur : exitium examen rapit : 
Advenit, et fera velivolantibus 
Navibus complebit manus litora.'* 

This is noble poetry. Another passage from the Telamo is as 

follows : — 

** Sed superstitiosi vates impudentesque arioli, 
Aut inertes aut insani aut quibus egestas imperat, 
Qui sibi semitam non sapiunt, alteri monstrant viam, 
Quibus divitias pollicentur, ab eis drachumam ipsi petunt. 
De his divitiis sibi deducant drachumam, reddant cetera." 

Here he shows, like so many of his countrymen, a strong vein 
of satire. The metre is trochaic, scanned, like these of Plautus 
and Terence, by accent as much as by quantity, and noticeable for 



62 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

the careless way in wliicli whole syllables are slurred over. In the 
former fragment the fourth line must be scanned — 

" Virgi I nes ae ] qiiales | vereor | patris niei | memn fac | tiim pudet." 
Horace mentions the ponderous weight of his iambic lines, which 
were loaded with spondees. The anapaestic measure, of which he 
was a master, has an impetuous swing that carries the reader away, 
and, while producing a different effect from its Greek equivalent, 
in capacity is not much inferior to it. Many of his phrases and 
metrical terms are imitated in Yirgil, though such imitation is much 
more frequently drawn from his hexameter poems. He wrote one 
Praetexta and several comedies, but these latter were uncongenial 
to his temperament, and by no means successful. He had little or 
no humour. His poetical genius was earnest rather than power- 
ful ; probably he had less than eitlier I^aevius or Plautus ; but 
his higher cultivation, his serious view of his art, and the con- 
sistent pursuit of a well-conceived aim, placed him on a dra- 
matic level nearly as high as Plautus in the opinion of the 
Ciceronian critics. His literary influence will be more fully dis- 
cussed under his epic poems. 

His sister's son Pacuvius (220-132 B.C.), next claims our atten 
tion. This celebrated tragedian, on whom the complimentary epithet 
ductus^ was by general consent bestowed, was brought up at Brun- 
disium, where amid congenial influences he practised with success 
the art of a painter. At what time he came to Eome is not known, 
but he gained great renown there by his paintings before 
attaining the position of chief tragic poet. Pliny tells us of a 
picture in the Temple of Hercules in the Forum Eoarium, which 
was considered as only second to that of Fabius Pictor. With 
the enthusiasm of the poet he united that genial breadth of 
temper which among artists seems peculiarly the painter's gift. 
Happy in his twofold career (for he continued to paint as well 
as to write), 2 free from jealousy as from want, successful as a 
poet and as a man, he lived at Eome until his eightieth year, 
the friend of Laelius and of his younger rival Accius, and 
retired soon after to his native city where he received the 
visits of younger writers, and died at the great age of eighty- 
eight (132 B.C.). His long career was not productive of a large 
number of works. We know of but twelve tragedies and one 
praetexta by him. The latter was called Faullus, and had for 
its hero the conqueror of Perseus, King of Macedonia, but no 
fragments of it survive. The great authority which the name 

1 Aufert Pacuvius docti famam senis. — Ilor. Ep. ii. 1, 56. 

2 We learn from Pliny that he decorated his own scenes. 



ROMAN TRAGEDY — PACUVIUS. 63 

of Pacuvius possessed was due to the care with whicli lie ela- 
borated his writings. Thirteen plays and a few saturae in a 
period of at least thirty years ^ seems but a small result; but 
the admirable way in which he sustained the dramatic situa- 
tions made every one of them popular with the nation. There 
were two, however, that stood decidedly above the rest — the 
Antiopa and the Dulorestes. Of the latter Cicero tells the 
anecdote that the people rose as one man to applaud the noble 
passage in which Pylades and Orestes contend for the honour of 
dying for one another. ^ Of the former he speaks in the highest 
terms, though it is possible that in his admiration for the severe 
and truly Eoman sentiments it inculcated, he may have been 
indulgent to its artistic defects. The few lines that have come 
down to us resemble that ridiculed by Persius^ for its turgid 
mannerisms. A good instance of the excellences which a Eoman 
critic looked for in tragedy is afforded by the praise Cicero bestows 
on the Nipt r a, a play imitated from Sophocles. The passage is so 
interesting that it may well be added here.* Cicero's words are — 
" The wise Greek (Ulysses) when severely wounded does not 
lament overmuch ; he curbs the expression of his pain. ' For- 
ward gently,' he says, ' and with quiet effort, lest by jolting me 
you increase the pangs of my wound.' IS'ow, in this Pacuvius 
excels Sophocles, Avho makes Ulysses give way to cries and tears. 
And yet those who are carrying him, out of consideration for the 
majesty of him they bear, do not hesitate to rebuke even this 
moderate lamentation. ' We see indeed, Ulysses, that you have 
suffered griei^ous hurt, but methinks for one who has passed his 
life in arms, you show too soft a spirit.' The skilful poet knows 
that habit is a good teacher how to bear pain. And so Ulysses, 
though in extreme agony, still keeps command over his words. 
* Stop ! hold, I say ! the ulcer has got the better of me. Strip off 
my clothes. 0, woe is me ! I am in torture.' Here he begins to 
give way ; but in a moment he stops — ' Cover me ; depart, now 
leave me in peace ; for by handling me and jolting me you increase 
the cruel pain.' Do you observe how it is not the cessation of bodily 
anguish, but the necessity of chastening the expression of it that 
keeps him silent % And so, at the close of the play, while himself 
dying, he has so far conquered liimself that he can reprove others in 
words like these, — 'It is meet to complain of adverse fortune, but not 
to bewail it. That is the part of a man ; but weeping is granted 

1 We infer that he came to Rome not later than 169, as in that year he 
"buried Ennius ; but Lt is likely that he arrived much earlier. 

2 De Am. vii. 

3 1, 77. "Antiopa aerumnis cor luctificabile fulta." ^Tusc. [I. x, 48 



64 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

to the nature of woman.' Tlie softer feelings iiere obey the other 
part of the mind, as a dutiful soldier obeys a stern commander." 

We can go with Cicero in admiring the manly spirit that breathes 
through these lines, and feel that the poet was justified in so far 
leaving the original as without prejudice to the dramatic effect to 
inculcate a higher moral lesson. 

As to the treatment of his models we may say, generally, that 
Pacuvius used more freedom than Ennius. He was more of an 
adapter and less of a translates ^Nevertheless this dependence on 
his own resources for description appears to have cramped rather 
than freed his style. The early Latin writers seem to move more 
easily when rendering the familiar Greek originals than when 
essaying to steer their own path. He also committed the mistake of 
generally imitating Sophocles, the untransplantable child of Athens, 
instead of Euripides, to whom he could do better justice, as the suc- 
cess of his Euripidean plays prove. ^ His style, though emphatic, was 
wanting in naturalness. The author of the treatise to Herennius 
contrasts the sententiae of Ennius with i]iQperiudi of Pacuvius; and 
Lucilius speaks of a word "contorto aliquo ex Pacuviano exordio." 

Quintilian^ notices the inelegance of his compounds, and makes 
the just remark that the old writers attempted to reproduce Greek 
analogies without sufficient regard for the capacities of their Ian 
guage ; thus while the word Kvprdvxrjv is elegant and natural, its 
Latin equivalent incur i)icervicus, borders on the ludicrous.^ Some 
of his fragments show the same sceptical tendencies that are pro- 
minent in Ennius. One of them contams a comprehensive survey 
of the different philosophic systems, and decides in favour of blind 
chance (temeritas) as the ruling power, on the ground of sudden 
changes in fortune hke that of Orestes, who in one day was meta- 
morphosed from a king into a beggar. Paucuvius either improved 
his later style, or else confined its worst points to his tragedies, for 
nothing can be more classical and elegant than his epitaph, which 
is couched in diction .^ refined as that of Terence — 

Adulesccns, tametsi properas, to hoc saxum vocal 
Ut sese aspicias, deinde quod scriptumst legas. 
Hie sunt poetae Pacuvi Marci sita 
Ossa. Hoc volebaii) nescius ne esses. Vale. 



1 The Antiopa and Dulorestes. 2 Quint. I. V. 67-70. 

3 We give the reader an example of this feature of Pacuvius's style. In the 
j4ntio2)ci, Aniphion gives a description of the tortoise : " Quaclriqjes tardi- 
grada agrestis luimilis aspera Cajnte brevi ccrvice anguina aspcdu truci 
Eviscerata inanima cum animali sono." To which his hearers reply —" Ita 
sacijtuosa diciionc dbs te datur. Quod coniectura sapiem aegre contulit. Na>i 
intelUgimus nisi si aperte dixeris.''^ 



Accnj§. 65 

When Pacuvius retired to Brundisium he left a worthy succes- 
sor in L. Attius or Accius (170-94 e.g.), whom, as before observed, 
he had assisted with his advice, showing kindly interest as a fellow- 
workman rather than jealousy as a rival. Accius's parents belonged 
to the class of Ubertini ; they settled at Pisaurum. The poet 
began his dramatic career at the age of thirty with the At reus, and 
continued to exhibit until his death. He forms the hnk between tke 
ante-classical and Ciceronian epochs ; for Cicero when a boy^ con- 
versed with him, and retained always a strong admiration for his 
works. 2 He had a high notion of the dignity of his calling. 
There is a story told of his refusing to rise to Caesar when he 
entered the Collegium Poetarum ; but if by this Julius be meant, the 
chronology makes the occurrence impossible. Besides thirty-seven 
tragedies, he wrote Annales (apparently mythological histories in 
hexameters, something of the character of Ovid's Fasti), Didasca- 
lia, or a history of Greek and Eoman poetry, and other kindred 
works, as well as two Fraetextm. 

The fragments that have reached us are tolerably numerous, 
and enable us to select certain prominent characteristics of his 
style. The loftiness for which he is celebrated seems to be of 
expression rather than of thought, e.g. 

" Quid ? quod videbis laetum in Parnasi ingo 
Bicipi inter pinos tripndiantem in circulis 
Concutere thyrsos ludo, taedis fnlgere ; " 

but sometimes a noble sentiment is simply and emphatically 



'* Ifon genus virum ornat, generi vir fortis loco."^ 

He was a careful chooser of words, e.g. 

** Tn per tinaciam esse, Antiloche, banc praedicas, 
Ego 2Jcrvicaciam aio et ea me uti volo : 
Haec fortis sequitur, illani indocti possident . . . • 
Nam pervicacem did me esse et vincere 
Perfacile patior, pertinaciam nil moror."^ 

These distinctions, obvious as they are to us, were by no means 
so to the early Eomans. Close resemblance in sound seemed 
irresistibly to imj^ly some connexion more than that of mere 
accident ; and that turning over the properties of words, which 

^ Prob. 94 B.C. wben Cic. was twelve years old. In Plane. 24, 59, be 
calls him " gravis et ingeniosus poeta." 

2 Cf. Hor. Ep. ii. 1, 56 ; Ctr. Am. i. 15, 19. On the other band, Hor. S. I. 
X. 53. 

3 Loco = decori, Non. 338, 22. 

^ Compare a similar .subtle distinction in tbe Dulorestes, ** Piget paternuia 
nomen, maternum jjudet profari." . 



66 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

in philosophy as well as poetry seems to «s to have something 
childish in it, had its legitimate place in the development of each 
language. Accius paints action with vigoiu?. We have the fol- 
lowing spirited fragment — 

" Constituit, cognovit, sensit, conlocat sese in locum 
Celsura : liinc manibus rapere raudus saxeuin et grave." 
and again — 

*' Heus vigiles properate, expergite, 
Pectora tarda, sopore exsurgite ! " 

He was conspicuous among tragedians for a power of reasoned 
eloquence of the forensic type ; and delighted in making two rival 
pleaders state their case, some of his most successful scenes heing 
of this kind. His opinions resembled those of Ennius, but were 
less irreverent. He acknowledges the interest of the gods in 
human things — 

** Nam non facile sine deum opera humana propria^ sunt bona," 

and in a fragment of the Brutus he enforces the doctrine that 
dreams are often heaven-sent warnings, full of meaning to those 
that will understand them. ^Nevertheless his contempt for augury 
was equal to that of his master — 

*' Nil credo anguribus qui auris verbis divitant 
AUenas, suas ut auro locupletent domos." 

The often-quoted maxim of the tyrant oderint dura metuanf is 
first found in him. Altogether, he was a powerful writer, with 
less strength perhaps, but more polish than Ennius ; and while 
manipulating words with greater dexterity, losing but little of 
that stern grandeur which comes from the plain utterance of 
conviction. His general characteristics place him altogether 
within the archaic age. In point of time httle anterior to Cicero, 
in style he is almost a contemporary of Ennius. The very slight 
increase of linguistic polish during the century and a quarter 
which com]Drises the tragic art of Eome, is somewhat remarkable. 
The old-fashioned ornaments of assonance, alliteration, and plays 
upon words are as frequent in Accius as in Livius, or rather more 
so ; and the number of archaic forms is scarcely smaller. We see 
words like noxltuxlo, honest Itudo, sanctescat, topper, domuitio, red- 
Jiostire, and wonder that they could have only preceded by a few 
years the Latin of Cicero, and \vere contemporary with that of 
Gracchus. Accius, like so many Romans, was a grammarian ; he 
introduced certain changes into the received spelling, e.g. he 
wrote aa, ee, etc. Avhen the vowel was long, reserving the single 



Accius. 67 

a, e, etc. for the short quantity. It was in acknowledgment of the 
interest taken by him in these studies that Yarro dedicated to 
him one of his many philological treatises. The date of his death 
is not quite certain ; but it may be safely assigned to about 90 
B.C. With him died tragic -syriting at Eome : scarcely a generation 
after we find tragedy has donned the form of the closet drama, 
written only for recitation. Cicero and his brother assiduously 
cultivated this rhetorical art. When writing failed, however, 
acting rose, and the adiikimTjic peifo.:Diances of Aesopus and 
Eoscius did much to keep alive an interest in the old works. 
Yarius and PoUio seem for a moment to have revi'V'ed tLe tragic 
muse under Augustus, but their works had probably nothing in 
common with this early but interesting drama ; and in Imperial 
times tragedy became more and more confused with rhetoric, untD 
delineation of character ceased to be an object, and declamatory 
force or fine point was the chief end pursued. 



CHAPTER YI. 

Epic Poetry. Ennius — Eurius (200-100 b.o.) 

Wb must now retrace our steps, and consider Ennius in the 
capacity of epic poet. It was in this light that he acquired his 
chief contemporary renown, that he accredits himself to posterity 
in his epitaph, and that he obtained that commanding influence 
over subsequent poetic literature, which, stereotyped in Virgil, 
was never afterwards lost. The merit of discerning the most 
favourable subject for a Eoman epic belongs to !N'aevius; in this 
department Ennius did but borrow of him ; it was in the form in 
which he cast his poem that his originality was shown. The 
legendary history of Home, her supposed connection with the 
issues of the Trojan war, and her subsequent military achieve- 
ments in the siDhere of history, such was the groundwork both of 
JSTaevius's and Ennius's conception. And, however unsuitable such 
a consecutive narrative might be for a heroic poem, there was 
something in it that corresponded with the national sentiment, 
and in a changed form it re-appears in the Aeneid. J^aevius had 
been contented with a single episode in Rome's career of conquest. 
Ennius, ^vith more ambition but less judgment, aspired to grasp 
in an epic unity the entire history of the nation ; and to achieve 
this, no better method occurred to him than the time-honoured 
and prosaic system of annals. The difficulty of recasting these in 
a poetic mould might well have staggered a more accomplished 
master of song ; but to the enthusiastic and laborious bard the 
task did not seem too great. He lived to complete his work in 
accordance with the plan he had proposed, and though, perhaps, 
the manus ultima may have been wanting, there is nothing to 
show that he was dissatisfied with his results. We may perhaps 
smile at the vanity Avhich aspired to the title of Eoman Homer, 
and still more at the partiality which so willingly granted it; 
nevertheless, with all deductions on the score of rude conception 
and ruder execution, the fragments that remain incline us to 
concur with Scaliger in wishing that fate had spared us the 



EPIC POETRY — ENNIUS 69 

whole, and denied us Silius, Statins, Lucan, " et tons ces gar^ons 
la." The whole was divided into eighteen books, of which the 
first contained the introduction, the earliest traditions, the foun- 
dation of Eome, and the deification of Eomulus ; the second and 
third contained the regal period ; the fourth began the history of 
the Repubhc and carried it down to the burning of the city by 
the Gauls ; the fifth comprised the Samnite wars ; the sixth, that 
with Pyrrhus ; the seventh, the first Punic war ; the eighth and 
ninth, the war with Hannibal ; the tenth and eleventh, that with 
Macedonia; the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth, that with 
Syria ; the fifteenth, the campaign of Fulvius N^obilior in Aetolia, 
and ended apparently with the death of the great Scipio. The 
work then received a new preface, and continued the history down 
to the poet's last years, containing many personal notices, until it 
was finally brought to a close in 172 B.C. after having occupied 
its author eighteen years. ^ " The interest of this last book," says 
Conington,2 " must have centred, at least to us, in the discourse 
about himself, in which the old bard seems to have indulged in 
closing this his greatest poem. Even now we may read with 
sympathy his boastful allusion to his late enrolment among the 
citizens of the conquering city; we may be touched by the 
mention he appears to have made of the year of his age in which 
he wrote, bordering closely on the appointed term of man's life ; 
and we may applaud as the curtain falls on his grand comparison 
of himself to a victorious racer laden with Olympian hononr.s, and 
now at last consigned to repose : — 

* Sicut fortis equus, spatio qui saepe supremo 
Vicit Olimpia, nunc senio confectus quiescit.' " 

He was thus nearly fifty when he began to write, a fact which 
strikes us as remarkable. We are accustomed to associate the 
poetic gift with a highly-strung nervous system, and unusual 
bodily conditions not favourable to long life, as well as with a 
precocious special development which proclaims unmistakably in 
the boy the future greatness of the man. None of these condi- 
tions seem to have been present in the early Roman school. 
Livius was a quiet schoolmaster, ITaevius a vigorous- soldier, 
Ennius a self-indulgent but hard-working litterateur, PlautUs an 
active man, whose animal spirits not even the flour-mill could 
quench, Pacuvius a steady but genial student, Accius and Terence 
finished men of the world; and all, except Terence (and he 
probably met his early death through an accident), enjoyed the 

1 Vahlen, quoted by Teuffel, 2 90, 3 ; see Gell. xvii. 21, 43. 

2 Post. Works, i. p. 344. 



70 HISTOKY OF r.OMAN LITERATURE. 

full term of man's existence. Moreover, few of tliem began life 
by being poets, and some, as Ennius and Plautus, did not apply 
themselves to poetry until they had reached mature years. With 
these facts the character of their genius as a rule agrees. We 
should not expect in such men the fine inspiration of a Sophocles, 
a Goethe, or a Shelley, and we do not find it. The poetic frenzy, 
so magnificently described in the Phaedras of Plato, which caused 
the Greeks to regard the poet in his moments of creation as 
actually possessed by the god, is nowhere manifest among the 
early Eomans ; and if it claims to appear in their later literature, 
we find it after all a spurious substitute, difiering widely from the 
emotion of creative genius. It is not mere accident that Eome is 
as little productive in the sphere of speculative philosophy as she 
is in that of the highest poetry, for the two endowments are 
closely allied. The problem each sets before itself is the same ; 
to arrest and embody in an intelligible shape the idea that shall 
give light to the dark questionings of the intellect, or the vague 
yearnings of the heart. To Eome it has not been given to open 
a new sphere of truth, or to add one more to the mystic voices of 
passion ; her epic mission is the humbler but still not ignoble one 
of bracing the mind by her masculine good sense, and linking 
together golden chains of memory by the majestic music of hei 
verse. 

There were two important elements introduced into the 
mechanism of the story by Ennius ; the 01}Tnpic Pantheon, and 
the presentation of the Eoman worthies as heroes analogous to 
those of Greece. The latter innovation was only possible within 
narrow limits, for the idea formed by the Eomans even of their 
gpjeatest heroes, as Eomulus, Numa, or Camillus was difi'erent in 
kind from that of the Greek hero-worshipper. Thus we see that 
Virgil abstains from applying the name to any of his Italian 
characters, confining it to such as are mentioned in Homer, or are 
connected with the Homeric legends. Still we find at a later 
period Julius Caesar publicly professing his descent on both sides 
from a superhuman ancestor, for such he practically admits 
Ancus Martins to be.^ And in the epic of Silius Italicus the 
Eoman generals occupy quite the conventional position of the 
hero-leader. 

The admission of the Olympic deities as a kind of divine 
machinery for diversifying and explaining the narrative was much 
more pregnant mth consequences. Outwardly, it is simply adopted 
from Homer, but the spirit which animates it is altogether diflerent. 

^ Inest in genere et sanctitas reguni, qui plnrimum inter homines pollent, 
et caeiimonia deorum, quorum ipsi in po testate sunt reges. — Suet. Jul. 6 



EPIC POETEY— ENNIUS. 71 

The Greek, in spite of his intellectual scepticism, retained an 
aesthetic and emotional belief in his national gods, and at any rate 
it was natural that he should celebrate them in his verse ; but 
the Eoman poet claimed to utilize the Greek Pantheon for artistic 
purposes alone. He professed no belief in the beings he depicted. 
They were merely an ornamental, supernatural element, either 
introduced at will, as in Horace, or regulated according to tradi- 
tional conceptions, as in Ennius and Virgil. Apollo, Minerva, 
and Bacchus, were probably no more to him than they are to us. 
They were names, consecrated by genius and convenient for art, 
under which could be combined the maximum of beautiful associa- 
tions with the minimum of trouble to the poet. The custom, 
which perpetuated itself in Latin poetry, revived again with the 
rise of Italian art ; and under a modified form its influence may 
be seen in the grand conceptions of Milton. The true nature of 
romantic poetry is, however, alien to any such mechanical employ- 
ment of the supernatural, and its comparative infrequency in the 
highest English and German poetry, stamps these as products of 
the modern spirit. Had the Eomans left Olympus to itself, and 
occupied themselves only with the rhetorical delineation of human 
action and feeling, they would have chosen a less ambitious but 
certainly more original path. Lucretius struggles against the pre- 
vaihng tendency ; but so unable were the Eomans to invest their 
finer fancies with any other shape, that even while he is blaming 
the custom he unawares falls into it. 

It was in the metrical treatment that Ennius's greatest achieve- 
ment lay. Eor the first time in any consecutive way he introduced 
the hexameter into Latin poetry. It is true that Plautus had com- 
posed his epitaph in that measure, if we may trust Varro's judg- 
ment on its genuineness. 1 And the Marcian oracles, though their 
rhythm has been disputed, were in all probability written in the 
same. 2 But these last were translations, and were in no sense an 
epoch in literature. Ennius compelled the intractable forms of 
Latin speech to accommodate themselves to the dactylic rhythm. 
Difficulties of two kinds met him, those of accent and those of 
quantity. The former had been partially surmounted by the comic 
writers, and it only required a careful extension of their method 

1 "Postqiiamst morte datus Plautus Comoedia luget: 
Scaenast deserta ; dein Eisus, Ludus, Jocusque 
Et numeri innumeri simul omnes collacrumarunt." — Gell. i. 2i, 3. 
* " Amnem, Troiugena, Cannam Romane fuge hospes," is the best known 
of these lines. Many others have been collected, and have been arranged 
with less probability, in Saturnian verse by Hermann. The substance is 
given, Livy, xxv. 12. See Browne, Hist. Ptom. Lit. p. 34, 35. Another is 
preserved by Ennius, Aio te, Aeacida, Eoinanos vincere posse 



72 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

to render the deviations from the familiar emphasis of daily life 
harmonious and acceptable. In respect of quantity the problem 
was more complex. Plautus had disregarded it in numerous 
instances {e.g. clari), and in others had been content to recognize 
the natural length or shortness of a vowel {e.g. senex ipse), neglect- 
ing the subordinate laws of position, &c. This custom had, as far 
as we know, guided Ennius himself in his dramatic poems ; but 
for the epos he adopted a different principle. Taking advantage 
of the tendency to shorten final vowels, he fixed almost every 
doubtful case as short, e.g. musd, patre, dare, omnibus, amavei'is, 
pater, only leaving the long syllable where the metre required it, 
as condide7'it. By this means he gave a dactylic direction to Latin 
prosody which it afterwards, though only slightly, extended. At 
the same time he observed carefully the Greek laws of position 
and the doubled letters. He admitted hiatus, but not to any great 
extent, and chiefly in the caesura. The lengthening of a short 
vowel by the ictus occurs occasionally in his verses, but almost 
always in words where it was originally by nature long. In such 
words the lengthening may take place even in the thesis of the 
foot, as in — 

"non enim rumores ponebat ante salutem." 
Elision played a prominent part in his system. This was natural, 
since with all his changes many long or intractable terminations 
remained, e.g. entm, quidem, omninm, &c. These were generally 
elided, sometimes shortened as in the line quoted, sometimes 
lengthened as in the comedians, — 

"inimicitiam agitante«." 

Very rarely does he improperly shorten a naturally long vowel, 
e.g. co/2if?'a (twice) ; terminations in o he invariably retains, except 
ego and viodb. The final s is generally elided before a consonant 
when in the thesis of the foot, but often remains in the arsis {e.g. 
pleniC fidei, Isqne dies). The two chief blots on his versification 
are his barbarous examples of tmesis, — saxo cere comminuit brum : 
Massili portant invenes ad litora tanas ( = cerebrum, Massili- 
tanas), and his quaint apocope, cael, gau, do {caelum, gandlum, 
domum), probably reflected from the Homeric Sw, k^I, in which 
Lucilius imitates him, e.g. nol. (for nolueris). The caesura, which 
forms the chief feature in each verse, was not understood by Ennius. 
Several of his lines have no caesura at all ; and. that delicate 
alternation of its many varieties which charms us in Homer and 
Virgil, is foreign to the conception, as it would have been unattain- 
able by the efforts, of the rugged epic bard, ll^evertheless his 
labour achieved a great result. He stamped for centuries the 



EPIC POETRY— ENNIUS. 73 

character and almost the details of subsequent versification. ^ If 
we study the effect of his passages, we shall observe far greater 
power in single lines or sentences than in a continuous description. 
The solemn grandeur of some of his verses is unsurpassable, and, 
enshrined in the Aeneid, their dignity seems enhanced by their 
Burroundings. Such are — 

*' Tuque pater Tiberine tuo cum lumine sancto.** 

" Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem." 

" Quae neque Dardaniis campis potuere perire 
Nee quom capta capi, nee quom combusta cremari, 
Augusto augurio postquam incluta condita Eoma est." 

On the other hand he sometimes falls into pure prose ; 

" Gives Romani tum facti sunt Carapani," 
and the like, are scarcely metre, certainly not poetry. Later 
epicists in their desire to avoid this fault over elaborate their 
commonplace passages. Ennius tries, however clumsily, to copy 
Homer in dismissing them without ornament. The one or two 
similes that are preserved are among his least happy efforts. ^ 
Among battle scenes he is more at home, and these he paints with 
reality and strength. There are three passages of considerable 
length, which the reader who desires to judge of his narrative 
power should study. They are the dream of Ilia and the auspices 
of Eomulus in the first book, and the description of the friend of 
Servilius in the seventh. This last is generally thought to be a 
picture of the poet himself, and to intimate in the most pleasing 
language his relations to his great patron. For a singularly 
appreciative criticism of these fragments the student is referred to 
Sellar's Poets nf the Republic. The massive Eoman vigour of treat- 
ment which shone forth in the Annals and made them as it were a 
rock-he^vn monument of Eome's glory, secured to Ennius afar greater 
posthumous renown than that of any of the other early poets. Cicero 
extols him, and has no words too contemptuous for those who despise 
him. Lucretius praises him in the well known words — 

** Ennius ut noster cecinit, qui primus amoeno 
Detulit ex Helicoue perenni fronde coronam, 
Per gentis Italas hominum quae clam clueret."^ 



^ The shortening of final o, erg6, ponS, vigilandU, through the influence of 
accent, is almost the only change made after Ennius except in a few proper 
names. 

2 Compare that of the horse (II. vi. 506), *'Et turn sicut equus qui de prae- 
sepibu' fartus Vincla suis magnis animis abrupit, et inde Fert sese canipi 
per caerula laetaque prata Celso pectore, saepe iuham quassat simul altam: 
Spiritus ex anima calida spumas agit albas," with Virg. Aen. xi. 492. 
•3 Lucr. i. 111. 



74 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

Yirgil, it is true, never mentions him, but lie imitates him con- 
tinually. Ovid, with generous appreciation, allows the greatness 
of his talent, though he denies him art -^ and the later imperial 
writers are even affected in their admiration of him. Hfe continued 
to be read through the Middle Ages, and was only lost as late as 
the thirteenth century. 

Ennius produced a few scattered imitators, but not until upwards 
of two generations after his death, if we except the doubtful case 
of Accius. The first is Matius, who translated the Iliad into hexa- 
meters. This may be more properly considered as the sequel to 
Livius, but the few fragments remaining show that his versifica- 
tion was based on that of Ennius. Gellius, with his partiality for 
all that was archaic, warmly praises this work. 

HosTius wrote the Bellum Islricum in three books. This was 
no doubt a continuation of the great master's Annales. Wha* the 
war was is not quite certain. Some fix it at 178 b.c. ; others as 
late as 129 b.c. The earlier date is the more probable. We then 
have to ask when Ilostius himself lived. Teuffel inclines to place 
him before Accius ; but most commentators assign him a later 
date. A few lines are preserved in Macrobius,^ which seem to 
point to an early period, e.g. 

"non si mihi linguae 
Centum atque ora sient totideni vocesc^^ue liquatse," 

and again, 

" Dia Minerva, semol aiitem tu invictus Apollo 
Arquitenens Latonius." 

His object in quoting these is to show that they were copied hy 
Virgil. A passage in Propertius has been supposed to refer to 
him,^ 

" Splendidaque a docto fama refulget avo," 

where he would presumably be the grandfather of that Hostia 
whom under the name of Cynthia so many of Propertius's poems 
celebrate. Another poet of whom a few lines are preserved in 
Gellius and Macrobius is A. Furius of Antium, which little town 
produced more than one well-known writer. His work was entitled 
Annals. Specimens of his versification are — 
** Intersa Oceani linquens Aurora cubile." 
*' Quod genus lioc hominum Saturno sancte create?" 
** Pressatur pede pes, mucro mucrone, viro vir."* 



^ Tr. ii. 424. ^ Sat. vi. 1. ^ m. 20. 8, 

* Jmitated respectively, Virg. A. iv. 685 ; A. i. 539 ; A. x. 361. 



The Early History of Satire (Ennius to LuciLiue), 
200-103 B.C. 

Satire, as every one knows, is the one branch of literature 
claimed by the Eonians as their own.^ It is, at any rate, the 
branch in which their excellence is most characteristically dis- 
played. I^or is the excellence confined to the professed satirists ; 
it was rather inherent in the genius of the nation. All their 
serious writings tended to assume at times a satirical spirit. 
Tragedy, so far as we can judge, rose to her clearest tones in 
branding with contempt the superstitions of the day.. The epic 
verses of Ennius are not without traces of the same power. The 
prose of Cato abounds with sarcastic reflections, pointedly 
expressed. The arguments of Cicero's theological and moral 
treatises are largely sprinkled with satire. The whole poem of 
Lucretius is deeply imbued with it : few writers of any age 
have launched more fiery sarcasm upon the fear of death, or the 
blind passion of love than he has done in his third and fourth 
books. Even the gentle Virgil breaks forth at times into earnest 
invective, tipped with the flame of satire : ^ Dido's bitter irony, 
Jurnus' fierce taunts, show that he could wield with stern efl"ect 
this specially Eoman weapon. Lucan and Seneca affect a style 
which, though grotesque, is meant to be satirical; while at the 
close of the classical period, Tacitus transforms the calm domain 
of history into satire, more burning because more suppressed than 
that of any of his predecessors.^ 

The claim to an independent origin advanced by Quintilian 
has been more than once disputed. The name Satire has been 
alleged as indicative of a Greek original (^arvptKoV).* It ia true 

^ Satira tola nostra est — Quint, x. i. 

2 Aen. vi. 847, sqq. G-. ii. 190 ; ih. 461, sqq. 

* On this subject the reader may be referred to Merivale's excellent 
remarks in the last chapter of his History of the Komans under the Empire. 

■* It is probable that there were two kinds of Greek dpa^ia ararvpiKdu ; the 
tragic, of which we have an example in the Cyclops of Euripides, which 
represented the gods in a ludicrous light, and was abundantly furnisheci 



76 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

this can no longer be maintained. Still some have thought that 
the poems of Archilochus or the Silli may have suggested the 
Eoman form of composition. But the former, though full of 
invective, were iambic or personal, not properly satirical. And 
the Silli, of which examples are found in Diogenes Laertius and 
Dio Chrysostom, were rather patched together from the verses of 
serious writers, forming a kind of Cento hke the Carmen Nuptiale 
of Ausonius, than original productions. The Eoman Satire 
differed from these in being essentially didactic. Besides 
ridiculing the vices and absurdities of individuals or of society, 
it had a serious practical purpose, viz. the improvement of public 
culture or morals. Thus it followed the old Comedy of Athens 
in its plain speaking, and the method of Archilochus in its bitter 
hostility to those who provoked attack. But it differed from the 
former in its non-political bias, as well as its non-dramatic form : 
and from the latter in its motive, which is not personal enmity, 
but public spirit. Thus the assertion of Horace, that Lucilius is 
indebted to the old comedians, ^ must be taken in a general sense 
only, and not be held to invalidate the generally received opinion 
that, in its final and perfected form, Satire was a genuine product 
of Eome. 

The metres adopted by Satire was originally indifferent. The 
Satiirae of Ennius were composed in trochaics, hexameters, and 
iambics; those of Varro- (called Menippean, from Menippus of 
Gadara), mingled together prose and verse. ^ But from Lucilius 
onwards. Satire, accurately so called, was always treated in 
hexameter verse. ^ 

Nevertheless, Horace is unquestionably right in saying that it 
had more real affinity for prose than for poetry of any kind — 

** Primum ego me illorum, dederira quibus esse poetis, 
Excerpam iiumero : neque enim concludere versum 
Dixeris esse satis ; neque «i quis scribat, uti nos, 
Sermoni propiora, putes hunc esse poetam." ^ 

The essence of satiric talent is that it should be able to under- 
stand the complexities of real life, that it should penetrate 

with Sileni, Satyrs, &e. ; and the comic, which was cultivated at Alexandria, 
and certainly represented the follies and vices of contemporary life under the 
dramatic guise of heroic incident. But it is the non-dramatic character of 
Roman Satire that at once distinguishes it from these forms. 

1 See Hor. S. i. iv. 1-6. 

2 Tliese were of a somewhat different type, and will not be further dis- 
cussed here. See p. 144. Cf. <^uint. x. 1, 95. 

^ Not invariably, however, by Lucilius himself. He now and then 
em]>loyed the trochaic or iambic metres. 

* Sat. i. iv. 39, and more to the same effect in the later part of the satire. 



SATIRE. 77 

beneath the surface to the true motives of action, and if these are 
bad, should indicate by life-like touches their ridiculous or con- 
temptible nature. There is room here for great variety of treat- 
ment and difference of personnel. One may have a broad and 
masculine giasp of the main outlines of social intercourse ; another 
with subtler analysis may thread his way through the intricacies 
of dissimulation, and lay bare to the hvpocrite secrets which he 
had concealed even from him^blf; a irard may select certain 
provinces of conduct or thought, and by a good-humoured but 
discrii7imating portraiture, throw them into so new and clear a 
light, as to enable mankind to look at them, free from the 
prejudices with which convention so often blinds our view. 

The qualifications for excelHng in this kind of writing are 
clearly such as have no special connection with poetry. - Had the 
modern prose essay existed at Eome, it is probable the satirists 
would have availed themselves of it. Erom the fragments of 
Lucilius we should judge that he found the trammels of verse 
somewhat embarrassing. Practice had indeed enabled him to 
write with unexampled fluency ; ^ but except in this mechanical 
facility he shows none of the characteristics of a poet. The 
accumulated experience of modern life has pronounced in favour 
of abandoning the poetic form, and including Satire in the 
domain of prose. No doubt many celebrated poets in France 
and England have cultivated verse satire ; but in most cases they 
have merely imitated, whereas the prose essay is a true formation 
of modern literary art. Conington, in an interesting article,^ 
regards the progressive enlargement of the sphere of prose com- 
position as a test of a nation's intellectual advance. Thus con- 
sidered, poetry is the imperfect attempt to embody in vivid 
language ideas which have themselves hardly assumed definite 
form, and necessarily gives way to prose when clearness of 
thought and sequence of reasoning have established for themselves 
a more perfect vehicle. However inadequate such a view may be 
to explain the full nature of poetry, it is certainly true so far as 
concerns the case at present before us. The assignment of each 
special exercise of mind to its proper department of literature is 
undoubtedly a late growth of human culture, and such nations as 
have not attained to it, whatever may be the splendour of their 
literary creations, cannot be said to have reached the full maturity 
of intellectual development. 

The conception of Satire by the ancients is illustrated by a 

1 ** In hora ssepe ducentos ut multum versus dictabat stans pede in uno." 
Sat. 1, iv. 9. 
'^ rostbumous Works, ■vol. ii. on the Study of Latin. 



78 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

passage in Diomedes : ^ " Satira dicitur carmen apud Romanos 
nunc quidem maledicum et ad carpenda hominum vltia archaeae 
comoediae charactere compositum, quale scripserunt LucUius et 
Horatius et Persius ; at olim carmen quod ex variis poematihus 
constahat satira cocabatur, quale scripserunt Pacuvius et Ennius." 
This old-fashioned satura of Ennius may be considered as half- 
way between the early semi-dramatic farce and the classical Satire. 
It was a genuine medley, containing all kinds of subjects, often 
couched in the form of dialogue, but intended for recitation, not 
for action. The poem on Scipio was classed with it, but what 
this poem was is not by any means clear ; from the fragment that 
remains, describing a calm after storm in sonorous language, we 
should gather that Scipio's return voyage from Africa may have 
formed its theme. ^ Other subjects, included in the Saturae of 
Ennius, were the Hedyphagetlca, a humorous didactic poem 
on the mysteries of gastronomy, which may have suggested 
similar effusions by Lucilius and Horace ; ^ the Epicharrmis and 
Eufiemerus, both in trochaics, the latter a free translation of the 
Upa avaypacf}i^y or explanation of the gods as deified mortals ; and 
the Epigrams, among which two on the great Scipio are still pre- 
served, the first breathing the spirit of the Eeijublic, the second 
asserting with some arrogance the exploits of the hero, and his 
claims to a place among the denizens of heaven.* 

Of the Saturae of Pacuvius nothing is known. C. Lucilius 
(148-103 B.C.), the founder of classical Satire, was born in the 
Latin town of Suessa Aurunca in Campania. He belonged to 
an equestrian family, and was in easy circumstances.^ He is 
supposed to have fought under Scipio in the N'umantine War (133 
B.C.) when he was still quite a youth; and it is certain from 
Horace that he lived on terms of the greatest intimacy, both with 
him, Laelius, and Albinus. He is said to have possessed the 
house which had been built at the public expense for the son of 
King Antiochus, and to have died at Naples, where he was 
honoured with a public funeral, in the forty-sixth year of his 
age. His position, at once independent and unambitious (for he 
could not hold office in Eome), gave him the best possible chance 

1 iii. p. 481, P. (Teuffel). = 201, B.C. 

* As, e.g. the Precepts of Ofella, S. ii. 2, and the Unde et quo CatiusJ 
S. ii. 4. 

* The words are, (1) "Hie est ille situs, cui nemo civis neque hostis 
Quivit pro factis reddere operae pretinm," where "operae" must be pro- 
nounced "op'rae;" (2) * ' A sole exoriente supra Maeotis paludes Nemo est 
qui factis me acquiparare queat. Si fas endo plagas caelestum asceudere 
cuiquam est, Mi soli caeli maxima porta patet.' 

* Infra Lucili censum, Sat. ii. 1, 75. 



LUCILIUS. 79 

of observing social and political life, and of this chance he made 
the fullest use. He lived behind the scenes : he saw the corrup- 
tion prevalent in high circles ; he saw also the true greatness of 
those who, like Scipio, stood aloof from it, and he handed down 
to imperishable infamy each most signal instance of vice, whether 
in a statesman, as Lupus, ^ MeteUus, or Albucius, or in a private 
person, as the glutton GaUonius. 

It is possible that he now and then misapplied his pen to abuse* 
his own enemies or those of his friends, for we know that the 
honourable Mucins Scaevola was violently attacked by him ; 2 and 
there is a story that being once lampooned in the theatre in a 
libellous manner, the poet sued his detractor, but failed in obtaining 
damages, on the groimd that he himself had done the same to 
others. ^Nevertheless, there can be no doubt whatever that on 
the whole he nobly used the power he possessed, that his tren- 
chant pen was mainly enlisted on the side of patriotism, virtue, 
and enlightenment, and that he lashed without mercy corruption, 
hypocrisy, and ignorance. The testimony of Horace to his worth, 
coming from one who himself was not easily deceived, is entitled 
to the highest consideration ; ^ that of Juvenal, though more 
emphatic, is not more weighty,* and the opinion, blamed by 
Quintilian,^ that he should be placed above all other poets, shows 
that his plain language did not hinder the recognition of his moral 
excellence. 

Although a companion of the great, he was strictly popular in 
his tone. He appealed to the great public, removed on the one 
hand from accurate learning, on the other from indilference to 
knowledge. " Nee dodissimis" he says,^ " Manium Persium haec 
legere nolo, Junium Congum volo." And in another passsage 
quoted by Cicero,^ he professes to desire that his readers may be 
the Tarentines, Consentines, and Sicilians, — those, that is, whose 
Latin grammar and spelling most needed improvement. But we 
cannot extend this humility ^ to his more famous political allu- 
sions. Those at any rate would be nothing if not known to the 
parties concerned ; neither the poet's genius nor the culprit's guilt 
could otherwise be brought home to the individual. 

Li one sense Lucilius might be called a moderniser, for he 
strove hard to enlarge the people's knoAvledge and views ; but in 

^ L. Com. Lentulus Lupus. 2 Pers. i. 115. 

• " Primores populi anipuit populumque tributini, 

Scilicet uni aequus virtuti atciue eiiis amicis." — Ilor. Sat. ii. 1, 69. 

* Ense velut stricto (juoties Lucilius ardens Infremuit, rubet auditor cui 
frigida mens est Crirainibus, tacita sudant praecordia culpa. — Juv. i. 165. 

6 X. 1. 93. 6 piij^, ]s-. H. Praef. 

^ De Fin. i. 3, 7. ® "Lucilianae humilitatis." — Petronius. 



80 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

another and higher sense he was strictly national : luxury, bribery, 
and sloth, were to him the very poison of all true life, and cut at 
the root, of those virtues by which alone Eome could remain 
great. This national spirit caused him to be preferred to Horace 
by conservative minds in the time of Tacitus, but it probably 
made his critics somewhat over-indulgent. Horace, with all his 
admiration for him, cannot shut his eyes to his evident faults,^ 
Ihe rudeness of his language, th» carelessness of his composition, 
the habit of mixing Greek and Latin words, which his zealous 
admirers construed into a virtue, and, last but not least, the 
diff'useness inseparable from a hasty draft which he took no 
trouble to revise. Still his elegance of langul^e must have been 
considerable. Pliny speaks of him as the first to establish a 
severe criticism of style, ^ and the fragments reveal beneath the 
obscuring garb of his uncouth hexameters, a terse and pure idiom 
not unlike that of Terence. His faults are numerous,^ but do not 
seriously detract from his value. The loss of his works must be 
considered a serious one. Had they been extant we should have 
foimd useful information in his pictures of life and manners in 
a state of moral transition, amusement in such pieces as his 
journal of a progress from Eome to Capua,* and material for 
philological knowledge in his careful distinctions of orthography 
and grammar. 

As a favourable specimen of his style, it will be sufficient to 
quote his definition of vktue : 

** Virtus, Albine, est pretium persolvere verum 
Quis in versamur, qiiis vivimus rebus potesse. 
Virtus est homini scire id quod quaeque habeat res. 
Virtus scire homini rectum, utile, quid sit honestum, 
Quae bona, quae mala item, quid inutile, turpe, inhonestunu 
Virtus, quaerendae finem rei scire modumque; 
Virtus divitiis pretium persolvere posse. 
Virtus, id dare quod reipsa debetur honori, 
Hostem esse atque inimicum hominum morumque maloruin ; 
Contra, defensorem hominum morumque bonorum ; 
Magnificare hos, his bene velle, his vivere amicum ; 
Commoda praeterea patriai prima putare, 
Deinde parentum, tertia iam postremaque nostra." 

We see in these lines a practical and unselfish standard — that 

1 Sat. i. X. 2 Primus condidit stili nasum, K. H. Praef. 

^ As instances we may take "Has res ad te sciiptas Luci misimus Aeli :" 
again, "Si minus delectat, quod oTfX''o'' et Eisocratiumst, A-qpoiSesqiie 
simul totum ac sum^e tpa/cicDSes . . ." or worse still, "Villa Lticani mox 
potieris aca" for " Lucaniaca," quoted by Ausonius, who adds "Lucili vati 
sic imitator eris." 

^ From which Hor. bon-owed his Iter ad Brundisium. 



LUCILIUS. 81 

of the cultivated but still truly patriotic Eoman, admitting tlie 
necessity of knowledge in a way his ancestors might have ques- 
tioned, but keeping steadily to the main points of setting a true 
price upon all human things, and preferring the good of one's 
country to personal advantage. This is a morality intelligible to 
all, and if it falls below the higher enlightenment of modern 
knowledge, it at least soars above the average practice. "We are 
informed ^ that Lucilius did not spare his immediate predecessors 
and contemporaries in literafrare any more than in politics. He 
attacked Accius for his unauthorised innovations in spelling, 
Pacuvius and Ennius for want of a sustained level of dignity. 
His satire seems to have ranged over the whole field of life, so far 
as it was known to him; and though liis learning was in no 
department deep,^ it was sound so far as it went, and was guided 
by natural good taste. He will always retain an interest for us 
from the charming picture given by Horace of his daily life ; how 
he kept his books beside him like the best of friends, as indeed 
they were, and whatever he felt, thought, or saw, intrusted to 
their faithful keeping, whence it comes that the man's life stands as 
vividly before one's eyes as if it had been painted on a votive tablet. 
Then the way in which Laelius and Scipio unbent in his com- 
pany, mere youth as he was compared to them, gives us a pleasing 
notion of his social gifts ; he who could make the two grave 
statesmen so far forget their decorum as to romp in the manner 
Horace describes, must at least have been gifted with contagious 
light-heartedness. This genial humour Horace tried with success 
to repwduce, but he is conscious of inferiority to the master. lu 
Englisli literature Dryden is the writer who most recalls him, 
thougli rathi^r in his higher than in his more sportive moods. 

iHor. S. i. X. 3 cic. de Flu. L 3, T. 



CHAPTER VIIL 

The. Minor Departments of Poetry — The Ateij^anae (Pom- 
ponius and novius, circ. 90 b.c.) anb the epigram 
(Ennius — Catulus, 100 b.c.). 

The last class of dramatic poets wliom we shall mention in the 
first period are the writers of AteManae. These entertainments 
originated at the little town of Atella, now St Arpino, between 
Gapua and Naples in the Oscan territory, and were at first com- 
posed in the Oscan dialect. Their earliest cultivation at Eome 
seems to date not long after 360 e.g., in which year the Etruscan 
histriones were first imported into Eome. The novelty of this 
amusement attracted the Eoman youths, and they began to 
imitate both the Etruscan dancers and .the Oscan performers, who 
had introduced the Atellane fables into Eome. After the libellous 
freedom of speech in which they at first indulged had been re- 
strained by law, the AteUanae seem to have established them- 
selves as a privileged form of pleasantry, in which the young 
nobles could, without incurring the disgrace of removal from their 
tribe or incapacity for military service, indulge their readiness of 
speech and impromptu dramatic talent. ^ During rather more 
than two centuries this custom continued, the performance con- 
sisting of detached scenes without any particular connection, but 
fuU of jocularity, and employing a fixed set of characters. The 
language used may have been the Oscan, but, considering the 
fact that a knowledge of that dialect was not universal at Eome,^ 
it was more probably the popular or plebeian Latin interspersed 
with Oscan elements. No progress towards a literary form is 
observable until the time of Sulla, but they continued to receive a 
countenance from the authorities that was not accorded to other 
forms of the drama. We find, for example, that when theatrical 
representations were interdicted, an exception was made in their 
favour.'^ Though coarse and often obscene, they were considered 

1 Liv. vii. 2. The account, however, is extremely confused. 

2 Liv. X. 208, gnaros Oscae linguae exploratum mittit. 
s Sec 'VqvAI. K. Lit. 9, § 4. 



THE ATELLANAE. 83 

as consistent with gentlemanly behaviour ; thus Cicero, in a well- 
known passage in one of his letters/ contrasts them with the 
Mimes, secundum Oenomaum Accii non, ut olim solebat, Aiel- 
lanam, sed, ut nunc fit, mimum introduxisti ; and Valerius Maxi- 
mus implies that they did not carry their humour to extravagant 
lengths, 2 but tempered it with Italian severity. From the few 
fragments that remain to us we should be inclined to form a 
different opinion, and to suspect that national partiality in con- 
trasting them with the Graecized form of the Mimi kept itself 
blind to their more glaring faults. The characters that oftene&t 
reappear in them are Maccus, Bucco, and Pappus; the first of 
these is prefixed to the special title, e.g. Maccus rniles, Maccus 
Virgo. He seems to have been a personage with an immense 
head, who, corresponding to our clown or harlequin, came in for 
many hard knocks, but was a general favourite. Pappus took 
the place of pantaloon, and was the general butt. 

Novius (circ. 100 B.C.), whom Macrobius^ calls prohatissimus 
Atellanarum scriptor, was the first to reduce this species to the 
rules of art, giving it a plot and a written dialogue. Several 
fragments remain, but for many centuries they were taken for 
those of !N'aevius, whence great confusion ensued. A better known 
writer is L. Pomponius (90 B.C.) of Bononia, Avho flourished in 
the time of Sulla, and is said to have persuaded that cultured 
sensualist to compose Atellanae himself. Upwards of thirty of his 
plays are cited; * but although a good many lines are preserved, 
no fragments are long enough to give a good notion of his style. 
The commendations, however, with which Cicero, Seneca, Gellius, 
and Priscian load him, prove that he was classed with good 
writers. Prom the list given below, it will be seen that the sub- 
jects were mostly, though not always, from low life ; some remind 
us of the regular comedies, as the Si/ri and Dotaia. The old- 
fashioned ornaments of puns and alliteration abound in him, as 
well as extreme coarseness. The fables, which were generally 
represented after the regular play as an interlude or farce, are 
mentioned by Juvenal in two of his satires : ^ 

** Urbicus exodio risum mo vet Atellanae Gestibus Autonoes; ** 

1 Ad Fam. ix. 16, 7. ^ yal. Max. ii. 1. « Sat. i. 10, 3. 

* The names are Aleones, Prostibulum, Pannuceatae, Nuptiae, Privignus, 
Piscatores, Ergastuliim, Patruus, Asinaiia, Rusticus, Dotata, Decuma 
FuUonis, Praeco, Bucco, Maccigemini,Verresaegrotus, Pistor, Syri,'*Medicus, 
Ataialis, Sarcularius, Augur, I^etitor, Anulus, Praefectus, Arista, Hernia, 
Poraria, Marsupium, Aeditumus, Auctoratus, Satyra, Galli, Transalpini, 
Maccus miles, Maccus sequester, Pappus Agricola, Leno, Lar famiiiaris, &c 

f iii, 174, vi. 71. 



84 HISTOEY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

- and in his pretty description of a rustic fete — 

"Ipsa dierura 
Festorum herboso colitur si quando theatro 
Maiestas, tandt^mque redit ad pulpita notum 
Exodiuni, cum personae palleiitis liiatum 
In greniio matris formidat rusticus infans ; 
Aequales habitus illic, sirailemque videbis 
Orchestram et populum. ..." 

They endured a while under the empire, when we hear of a com- 
poser named Mummius, of some note, but in the general decline 
they became merged in the pantomime, into which all kinds of 
dramatic art gradually converged. 

If the Atellanae were the most indigenous form of literature in 
which the young nobles indulged, the different kinds of love-poem 
were certainly the least in accordance with the Eoman traditions 
of art. Nevertheless, unattainable as was the spontaneous grace of 
the Greek erotic muse, there were some who aspired to cultivate her. 

Few kinds of verse more attracted the Eoman amateurs than the 
Epigram. There was something congenial to the Eoman spirit in 
the pithy distich or tetrastich which formed so considerable an 
element in the "elegant extracts" of Alexandria. The term 
epigram has altered its meaning with the lapse of ages. In Greek 
it signified merely an inscription commemorative of some work of 
art, person, or event ; its virtue was to be short, and to he appro- 
priate. The most perfect writer of epigrams in the Greek sense 
was Simonides, — nothing can exceed the exquisite simplicity that 
lends an undying charm to his effusions. The epigrams on 
Leonides and on Marathon are well known. The metre selected 
was the elegiac, on account of its natural pause at the close of the 
second line. The nearest approach to such simple epigrams are 
the epitaphs of Naevius, Ennius, and especially Pacuvius, already 
quoted. This natural grace, however, was, even in Greek poetry, 
superseded by a more artificial style. The sparkhng epigram of 
Plato addressed to a fair boy has been often imitated, and most 
writers after him are not satisfied without playing on some fine 
thought, or turning some graceful point ; so that the epigram by 
little and little approached the form which in its purest age the 
Italian sonnet possessed. In this guise it was cultivated with 
taste and brilliancy at Alexandria, Callimachus especially being a 
finished master of it. The first Eoman epigrammatists imitate the 
Alexandrine models, and, making allowance for the uncouth hard- 
ness of their rhythm, achieve a fair success. Of the epigrams of 
Ennius,. only the three already quoted remain. ^ Tliree authors 

^ Viz. his own epitaph, and those on Scipio, p. 78, n. L 



THE EPIGRAM. 85 

are mentioned by Aulus Gellius^ as having raised the Latin 
Epigram to a level with Anacreon in sweetness, point, and neat- 
ness. This is certainly far too high praise. JSTor, even if it were 
so, can we forget that the poems he quotes (presumably the best 
he could find) are obvious imitations, if not translations, from the 
Greek. The first is by Q. Lutatius Catulus, and dates about 
100 B.O. It is entitled Ad Theotimum : 

" Aufugit mi animus ; credo, ut solet, ad Theotimum 

Devenit : sic est : perfugium illud habet. 
Quid si non interdixem ue illuc fugitivum 

Mitteret ad se intro, sed magis eiiceret ? 
Ibimus quaesitura : varum ne ipsi teneamur 

Fonnido : quid ago ? Da, Venus, consilium." 

A more pleasing example of his style, and this time perhaps 
original, is given by Cicero. ^ It is on the actor Eoscius, who, 
when a boy, was reno^med for his beauty, and is favourably com- 
pared with the rising orb of day : 

** Constiteram exorientem Auroram forte salutans, 
Cum subito c laeva Roscius exoritur. 
Pace niihi liceat, caelestes, dicere vestra : 
Mortalis visust pulcrior esse deo." 

This piece, as may be supposed, has met Avith imitators both in 
French and Italian hterature. A very similar jeu d'esjprit of 
PoRCius LiciNus is quoted ; 

** Custodes ovium, teneraeque propaginis agnum, 

Quaeritis ignem ? ite hue : Quaeritis ? iguis homo est. 
Si digito attigero, incendam silvam simul omnem, 
Onine pecus : fiamma est omnia quae video." 

This Porcius wrote also on the history of literature. Some 
rather ill-natured hnes on Terence are preserved in Suetonius. ^ 
He there implies that the young poet, with all his talent, couid 
not keep out of poverty, a taunt which we have good reason for 
disbelieving as well as disapproving. Two hnes on the rise of 
poetry at liome deserve quotation — 

*' Poeiiico bello secundo Miisa pinnato gradu 
Intulit se bellicosam Romuli in gentem feram." 

A certain Pompilius is mentioned by Yarro as having epigram- 
matic tastes; one distich that is preserved gives us no high 
notion of his powers — 

" Pacvi^ discipulus dicor: porro is fuit Enni: 
Ennius Musaium: I'ompilius clucor." 

Lastly, Valerius Aedituus, avIio is only known by the short 
^ xix. 9, 14. 2 De j^at. Deor. i. 28, 79. ^ Vit. Ter. * = Pacnvi. 



86 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

notices in Yarro and Gellius, wrote similar sliort pie'^es, two of 
wliiciL are preserved. 

AD PAMPHILAM. 

*' Dicere cum conor curam tibi, Pampliila, cordis, 
Quid mi abs te quaeram ? verba labris abeunt, 
Per pectus miserum manat subito mihi sudor. 
Si tacitus, subidus: duplo ideo pereo." 

AD PtJERUM PHILEROTA. 
** Quid faculam praefers, Phileros, qua nil opus no"bis1 
Ibimus, hoc lucet pectore flamma satis. 
Illam non potis est vis saeva exstinguere venti, 

Aut imber caelo candidus praecipitans. 
At contra, hunc igneni Veneris, si non Venus ipsa. 
Nulla est quae possit vis alia opprimL.e." 

We have quoted these pieces, not from their intrinsic merit, for 
they have httle or none, but to show the painful process by 
which Latin versification was elaborated. All these must be 
referred to a date at least sixty years after Ennius, and yet the 
rhythm is scarcely at all improved. The great number of second- 
rate poets who wrought in the same laboratory did good work, in 
so far that they made the technical part less wearisome for poets 
Like Lucretius and Catullus. With mechanical dexterity taste 
also slowly improved by the competing effort of many ordinary 
minds ; but it did not make those giant strides which nothing 
but genius can achieve. The later developments of the Epigram 
will be considered in a siibsequeiit book. 



CHAFTKK IX. 

Peose Literature — History. Fabius Pictor — l^lACBR 
(210-80 B.C.). 

There are nations among whom the imagination is so predomi- 
nant that they seem incapable of regarding things as they are. 
The literature of such nations will always be cast in a poetical 
mould, even when it takes the outward form of prose. Of this 
class India is a conspicuous example. In the opposite category 
stand those nations which, lacking imaginative power, supply its 
place by the rich colouring of rhetoric, but whose poetry, judged 
by the highest standard, does not rise above the sphere of prose. 
Modern France is perhaps the best example of this. The same is 
so far true of ancient Eome that she was unquestionably more 
productive of great prose writers than of poets. Her utilitarian 
and matter-of-fact genius inclined her to approach the problems of 
thought and hfe from a prosaic point of view. Her perceptions 
of beauty were defective ; her sense of sympathy between man 
and nature (the deepest root of poetry) slumbered until roused 
by a voice from without to momentary life. The aspirations and 
destiny of the individual soul which had kindled the brightest 
light of Greek song, were in Eome replaced by the sovereign 
claims of the Sta^e. The visible City, throned on Seven Hills, 
the source and emblem of imperial power, and that not ideal but 
actual, was a theme fitted to inspire the patriot orator or historian, 
but not to create the finer susceptibilities of the poet. We find 
in accordance with this fact, that Prose Literature was approached, 
not by strangers or freedmen, but by members of the noblest 
houses in Eome. The subjects were given by the features of 
national life. The wars that had gained dominion abroad, the 
eloquence that had secured power at home, the laws that had 
knit society together and made the people great ; these were the 
elements on which Prose Literature was based. Its developments, 
though influenced by Greece, are truly national, and on them the 
Eoman character is indelibly impressed. The first to establisL 



«8 HISTOKY OF EOMAN LITER ATUKE. 

itself was history. The struggles of the first Punic war had heen 
chronicled in the rude verse of JST^ievius ; those of the second prc^ 
duced the annals of Fabius and Cincius Ahmentus. 

From the earliest period the Eomans had a clear sense of the 
value of contemporary records. The Annates Maxlmi or Commen- 
tarii Fontijicum contained the names of magistrates for each year, 
and a daily record^ of all memorable events from the regal times 
until the Pontificate of P. Mucins Scaevola (133 B.C.). The 
occurrences noted wer'^, ^.lOAvevcr, mo.'^tly of a trivial character, 
as Cato tells us in a fragment of his Origines, and as we can gather 
from the extracts found in Livy. The Lihri Lintci, mentioned 
several times by Livy,^ were written on rolls of hnen cloth, and, 
besides hsts of magistrates, contained many national monuments, 
such as the treaty between Eome and Carthage, and the truce 
made with Ardea and Gabii. Similar notes were kept by the 
civil magistrates {Commentarii Consulares, Lihri Praetoruniy 
Tabulae Ceifisoriae) and stored up in the various temples. The 
greater number of these records perished in the capture of Eome 
by the Gauls, and when Livy speaks of them as existing later, 
he refers not to the originals, but to copies made after that 
event. Such yearly registers were continued to a late period. 
One of the most important was discovered in the sixteenth century, 
embracing a list of the great magistracies from 509 b.c. till the 
death of Augustus, and executed in the reign of Tiberius. Another 
source of history was the family register kept by each of the 
great houses, and treasured with peculiar care. It was probably 
more than a mere catalogue of actions performed or honours 
gained, sinc6 many of the more distinguished families preserved 
their records as witnesses of glories that in reality had never 
existed, but were the invention of flattering chroniclers or clients. 

The radical defect in the Eoman conception of history was its 
narrowness. The idea of preserving and handing down truth for 
its o^vn sake was foreign to them. The very accuracy of their 
early registers was based on no such high principle as this. It 
arose simply from a sense of the continuity of the Eoman common- 
wealth, from national pride, and from considerations of utility. 
The catalogue of prodigies, pestilences, divine visitations, expia- 
tions and successful propitiatory ceremonies, of which it was chiefly 
made up, was intended to show the value of the state rehgion, and 
to secure the administration of it in patrician hands. It was indeed 
praiseworthy that considerations so patriotic should at that rude 
jieriod have so firmly rooted themselves in the mind of the 

1 So says Servius, but this can hardly be eorrect. See the note at the 
end of the chapter. 2 ^.g. iv. 7, 13, 20. 



HISTORY — FABIUS PIGTOR. 89 

governing class ; but tliat their object was ratber to consolidate 
their own power ami advance that of the city than to instruct 
mankind, is clear from the totally untrustworthy character of the 
special gentile records ; and when history began to be cultivated 
in a literary way, we do not observe any higher motive at work. 
Fabius and Cinciu.s wrote in Greek, partly, no doubt, because in 
the unformed state of their own languag-e it was easier to do so ; 
but that this was not in itself a sufficient reason is shown by the 
enthusiasm with which not only their contemporary Ennius, but 
their predecessors Livius and ISTaevius, studied and developed the 
Latin tongue. Livius and Ennius worked at Latin in order to 
construct a literary dialect that should also be the speech of the 
people. Fabius and Cincius, we cannot help suspecting, ^vrote 
in Greek, because that was a language which the people did not 
understand. 

Belonging to an ancient house whose traditions were exclu- 
sive and aristocratic, Eabius (210 B.C.) addressed himself to 
the limited circle of readers who were conversant with the 
Greek tongue ; to the people at large he was at no pains to be 
intelligible, and he probably was as indifferent to their literary, as 
his ancestors had been to their pohtical, claims or advantages. 
The branch to which he belonged derived its distinguishing name 
from Fabius Pictor the grandfather of the historian, who, in 312 
B.C. painted the temple of Salu^ which was the oldest known 
specimen of Eoman art, and exiis^ed, applauded by the criticism 
of posterity, until the era of Claudius. This single incident 
proves that in a period when Eoman feeling as a rule recoiled 
from practising the arts of peace, members of this intellectual 
gens were already proficients in one of the proscribed Greek 
accomplishments, and taken into connection with the pohshed 
cultivation of the Claudii, and perhaps of other gentes, shows that 
in their private life the aristocratic party were not so bigoted as 
for political purposes they chose to represent themselves.^ As to 
the value of Fabius's work we have no good means of forming an 
opinion. Livy invariably speaks of him with respect, as scrip- 
torum longe antiquissimus ; and there can be little doubt that he 
had access to the best existing authorities on his subject. Eesides 
the pubhc chronicles and the archives of his own house, he is said 
to have drawn on Greek sources. Niebuhr, also, takes a high 
view of his merits ; and the unpretending form in which lie 
clothed his work, merely a bare statement of events without any 

^ The Roman mind was much more impressible to rich colour, decoration, 
&c. than the Greek. Possibly paiutiug may on this account have met with 
earlier countenance. 



90 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

attempt at literary decoration, inclines us to believe that so far as 
national prejudices allowed, lie endeavoured to represent faitkfully 
the facts of history. 

Of L. CiNcius Alimentus (flor. 209 b.c.) we should be inclined 
to form a somewhat higher estimate, from the fact that, when taken 
prisoner by Hannibal, he received greater consideration from him 
than almost any other Eoman captive. He conversed freely with 
him, and informed him of the route by which he had crossed the 
Alps, and of the exact number of his invading force. Cincius 
was praetor in Sicily 209 b.c. He thus had good opportunities 
for learning the main events of the campaign. Niebuhr^ says 
of him, "He was a critical investigator of antiquity, who threw 
light on the history of his country by researches among its ancient 
monuments. He proceeded in this work with no less honesty 
than diligence ; ^ for it is only in his fragments that we find a dis- 
tinct statement of the early relations between Eome and Latium, 
which in all the Annals were misrepresented from national pride. 
That Cincius vTote a book on the old Roman calendar, T\^e are 
told by Macrobius ; ^ that he examined into ancient Etruscan and 
Eoman chronology, is clear from Livy."* The point in which he 
differed from the other authorities most strikingly is the date he 
assigns for the origin of the city ; but Niebuhr thinks that his 
method of ascertaining it shows independent investigation.^ 
Cincius, like Fabius, began his work by a rapid summary of the 
early history of Eome, and detailed at full length only those 
events which had happened during his own experience. 
. A third writer who flourished about the same time was C. AciLius 
(circ. 184 B.C.), who, like the others, began with the foundation of 
the city, and apparently carried his work down to the war with 
Antiochus. He, too, wrote in Greek, ^ and was afterwards trans- 
lated into Latin by Claudius Quadrigarius,'^ in which form he was 
employed by Livy. Aulus Postumius Albinus, a younger con- 
temporary of Cato, is also mentioned as the author of a Greek 
history. It is very possible that the selection of the Greek 
language by all these Avriters was partly due to their desire to 
prove to the Greeks that Eoman history was worth studying ; for 
the Latin language was at this time confined to the peninsula, and 
was certainly not studied by learned Greeks, except such as were 

' R. H. vol. i. p. 272. 2 Ljy^ xxi. 38. calls him "maxlinus auctor." 

3 Sat. i. 12. 4 vii. 3. 

^ The question does not concern us here. The reader is referred to Niehnhr's 
chapter on the Era from the foundation of the city. 

Cic de Otf. iii. 32, 115. 

This is an inference, but a probable one, from a statement of Plutarch. 



1 



CATO. 91 

compelled to acquire it by relations with, their Eoman conquerors. 
Besides these authors, we learn from Polybius that the great Scipio 
furnished contributions to history : among other writings, a long 
Greek letter to king Philip is mentioned which contained a succinct 
account of his Spanish and African campaigns. His son, and also 
Scipio I^asica, appear to have followed his example in writing 
Greek memoirs. 

The creator of Latin prose writing was Cato (234-149 B.C.). 
In almost every department he set the example, and his works, 
voluminous and varied, retained their reputation until the close of 
the classical period. He was the first thoroughly national author. 

The character of the rigid censor is generally associated in our 
minds with the contempt of letters. In his stern but narrow 
patriotism, he looked with jealous eyes on all that might turn the 
citizens from a single-minded devotion to the State. Culture was 
connected in his mind with Greece, and her deleterious influence. 
The embassy of Diogenes, Critolaus, and Carneades, 155 B.C. had 
shoAvn him to what uses culture might be turned. The eloquent 
harangue pronounced in favour of justice, and the equally eloquent 
harangue pronounced next day against it by the same speaker 
without a blush of shame, had set Gate's face like a flint in 
opposition to Greek learning. "I will tell you about those 
Greeks," he wrote in his old age to his son Marcus, "what I dis- 
covered by careful observation at Athens, and how far I deem it 
good to skim through their Avritings, for in no case should they be 
deeply studied. I will prove to you that they are one and all, a 
worthless and intractable set. Mark my words, for they are those 
of a prophet : whenever that nation shall give us its literature, 
it will corrupt everything." ^ 

With this settled conviction, thus emphatically expressed at a 
time when experience had shown the realization of his fears to be 
inevitable, and when he himself had so far bent as to study the 
literature he despised, the long and active public life of Cato is in 
complete harmony. He is the perfect type of an old Eoman. 
Hard, shrewd, niggardly, and narrow-minded, he was honest to 
the core, imsparing of himself as of others, scorning every kind of 
luxury, and of inflexible moral rectitude. He had no respect for 
birth, rank, fortune, or talent ; his praise was bestowed sulsly on 
personal merit. He himself belonged to an ancient and honour- 
able house, 2 and from it he inherited those harsh virtues which, 
while they enforced the reverence, put him ir; conflict with the 
spirit, of the ago. 'No man could have ceL before himself a more 

* Vide M. Catoiiis Re'iqiuie, H Jordan, Lips. 1860. 

* So he himsfir assei^j but Uiey did not hold any Koman magistracy. 



92 HISTOKY OF KOMAN LITERATURE. 

uphill task than that which Cato struggled all his life vainly to 
achieve. To reconstruct the j)ast is but one step more impossible 
than to stem the tide of the present. If Cato failed, a greater 
than Cato would not have succeeded. Influences were at work in 
Eome which individual genius was powerless to resist. The 
ascendancy of reason over force, though it were the noblest fovm 
that force has ever assumed, was step by step establishing itself ; 
and no stronger proof of its victory could be found than that Cato, 
despite of himself, in his old age studied Greek. We may smile 
at the deep-rooted prejudice which confounded the pure glories of 
the old Greek intellect with the degraded puerilities of its un- 
worthy heirs ; but though Cato could not fathom the mind of 
Greece, he thoroughly understood the mind of Rome, and unavail- 
ing as his efforts were, they were based on an unerring compre- 
hension of the true issues at stake. He saw that Greece was 
unmaking Eome ; but he did not see that mankind required that 
Eome should be unmade. It is the glory of men like Scipio and 
Ennius, that their large-heartedness opened their eyes, and carried 
their vision beyond the horizon of the Eoman world into that 
dimly-seen but ever expanding country in which all men are 
bretlnen. But if from the loftiest point of vie-w their wide 
humanity obtains the palm, no less does Cato's pure patriotism 
shed undying radiance over his rugged form, throwing into relief its 
massive grandeur, and ennobhng rather than hiding its deformities. 
We have said that Cato's name is associated with the contempt 
of letters. This is no doubt the fact. l!^evertheless, Cato was by 
far the most original writer that Eome ever produced. He is the 
one man on whose vigorous mind no outside influence had ever 
told. Brought up at his father's farm at Tusculimi, he spent his 
boyhood amid the labours of the plough. Hard work and scant fare 
toughened his sinews, and service under Fabius in the Hannibalic 
war knit his frame into that iron strength of endurance, which, 
until his death, never betrayed one sign of weakness or fatigue. 
A saying of his is preserved — ^ " Man's life is like iron ; if you use 
it, it wears away, if not, the rust eats it. So, too, men are worn 
away by hard work ; but if they do no work, rest and sloth do 
more injury than exercise." On this maxim his own life was 
formed. In the intervals of warfare, he did not relax himself in 
the pleasures of the city, but went home to his plough, and im- 
proved his small estate. Being soon well known for his shrewd 
wit and ready speech, he rose into eminence at the bar ; and iu 
due time obtained all the offices of state. In every position he 

1 Gell. xi. 2. 



CATO. 93 

made many enemies, but most notably in his capacity of censor. 
• 'No man was oftener brought to trial. Forty-four times he spoke 
in his own defence, and every time he was acquitted.^ As Livy 
says, he wore his enemies out, partly by accusing them, but still 
more by the pertinacity with which he defended himself. ^ Be- 
sides private causes, he spoke in many important public trials and 
on many great questions of state : Cicero ^ had seen or heard of 
150 orations by him; in one passage he implies that he had 
delivered as many as Lysias, i.e. 230.* Even now we have traces, 
certainly of 80, and perhaps of 13 more.^ His military life, which 
had been a series of successes, was brought to a close 190 B.C., and 
from this time until his death, he appears as an able civil adminis- 
trator, and a vehement opponent of lax manners. In the year of 
his censorship (184 B.C.) Plautus died. The tremendous vigour 
with Avhich he wielded the powers of this post stirred up a swarm 
of enemies. His tongue became more bitter than ever. Plutarch 
gives his portrait in an epigram. 

Uvpphi/, iravSaKeT'r}V, yXavKofifiarov, ov5e Quvovra 
YlopKiQV €15 aiS7}V HeparecpovT] dex^Tai. 

Here, at 85 years of age,^ the man stands before us. "We see the 
crisp, erect figure, bristling with aggressive vigour, the coarse, red 
hair, the keen, grey eyes, piercingly fixed on his opponent's face, 
and reading at a glance the knavery he sought to hide ; we hear 
the rasping voice, launching its dry, cutting sarcasms one after 
another, each pointed with its sting of truth ; and we can well 
beheve that the dislike was intense, which could make an enemy 
provoke the terrible armoury of the old censor's eloquence. 

As has been said, he so far relaxed the severity of his principles 
as to learn the Greek language and study the great writers. Nov 
could he help feeling attracted to minds like those of Thucydides 
and Demosthenes, in sagacity and earnestness so congenial to his 
own. Nevertheless, his originality is in nothing more conspicu- 
ously shown than in his method of treating history. He struck a 
line of inquiry in which he found no successor. The Origines, if it 
had remained, would undoubtedly have been a priceless storehouse 
of facts about the antiquities of Italy. Cato had an enlarged view 
of history. It was not his object to magnify Eom© at the expense 
of the other Italian nationalities, but rather to show how she had 
become their greatest, because their truest, representative. The 
divisions of the work itself will show the importance he attached 

1 Plin. N. H. vii. 27. ^ Liv. xxxix. 40. ^ j)e Sen. xvii. 65. 

* Brut. xvi. 63. ® See H. Jordan's treatise. 

* This was his ag« when he accused the perjured Galba after his return 
from Numantia (149 B.C.) — one of the finest of his speeches. 



94 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

to an investigation of their early annals. "We learn from iN'epos 
that the first book comprised the regal period ; the second and 
third were devoted to the origin and primitive history of each 
Italian state -^ the fourth and fifth embraced the Punic wars ; the 
last two carried the history as far as the Praetorship of Servius 
Galba, Cato's bold accusation of whom he inserted in the body of 
the work. Il^epos, echoing the superficial canons of his age, 
characterises the whole as showing industry and diligence, but no 
learning whatever. The early myths were somewhat indistinctly 
treated. 2 His account of the Trojan immigration seems to have 
been the basis of that of Virgil, though the latter refashioned it in 
several points. ^ His computation of dates, though apparently exact, 
betrays a mind indiiferent to the importance of chronology. The 
fragments of the next two books are more copious. He tells us that 
Gaul, then as now, pursued with the greatest zeal military glory 
and eloquence in debate.* His notice of the Ligurians is far from 
complimentary. " They are all deceitful, having lost every record 
of their real origin, and being illiterate, they invent false stories 
and have no recollection of the truth. "^ He hazards a few ety- 
mologies, which, as usual among Eoman writers, are quite unscien- 
tific. GraviscjB is so called from its unhealthy chmate (gravis aer), 
Praeneste from its conspicuous position on the mountains (quia 
montihus praestet). A few scattered remarks on the food in use 
among different tribes are all that remain of an interesting depart- 
ment which might have thro^vu much light on ethnological ques- 
tions. In the fourth book, Cato expresses his disinclination to 
repeat the trivial details of the Pontifical tables, the fluctuations 
of the market, the eclipses of the sun and moon, &c.^ He narrates 
with enthusiasm the self-devotion of the tribune Caedicius, who in 
the first Punic war oftered his life with that of 400 soldiers to 
engage the enemy's attention while the general was executing a 
necessary manoeuvre.^ " The Laconian Leonides, who did the same 
thing at Thermopylae, has been rewarded by all Greece for his 
virtue and patriotism with all the emblems of the highest possible 
distinction — monuments, statues, epigrams, histories ; his deed met 
with their warmest gratitude. But little praise has been given to 
our tribune in comparison with his merits, though he acted just as the 
Spartan did, and saved the fortunes of the State." As to the title 
Origines, it is possible, as Nepos suggests, that it arose from the first 
three books having been published separately. It certainly is not 

1 Cato, 3, 2-4. 2 See Wordsworth, Fr. of early Latin, p. 611, § 2. 

3 Serv. ad Virg. Aen. i. 267. * Chaiis. ii. p. 181 (Jord). 

6 Serv. ad Virg. Aen. xi. 700. « Gell. ii. 28, 6. 

7 Gell. ill. 7, 1. 



CATO. 95 

applical)le to the entire treatise, wMcli was a genuine history on the 
same scale as that of Thucydides, and. no mere piece of antiquarian 
research. He adhered to truth in so far as he did not insert ficti- 
tious speeches ; he conformed to Greek taste so far as to insert his 
own. One striking feature in the later hooks was his omission 
of names. IS^o Eoman worthy is named in them. The reason of 
this it is impossible to discover. Fear of giving offence would he 
the last motive to weigh with him. Dishke of the great aristo- 
cratic houses into whose hands the supreme power was steadily 
being concentrated, is a more probable cause; but it is hardly 
sufhcient of itself. Perhaps" the omission was a mere whim of the 
historian Though this work obtained great and deserved renoAvn, 
yet, like it3 author, it was praised rather than imitated. Livy 
scarcely ever uses it ; and it is likely that, before the end of the 
first century a.d. the speeches were published separately, and were 
the only part at all generally read. Pliny, Gellius, and Servius, 
are the authors who seem most to have studied it ; of these Pliny 
was most influenced by it. The ^Natural History, especially in its 
general discussions, strongly reminds us of Cato. 

Of the talents of Cato as an orator something will be said in the 
next section. His miscellaneous writings, though none of them 
are historical, may be noticed here. Quintilian^ attests the many- 
sidedness of his genius : " M. Cato was at once a first-rate general, 
a philosopher, an orator, the foimder of history, the most thorough 
master of law and agriculture." The work on agriculture we have 
the good fortune to possess ; or rather a redaction of it, shghtly 
modernized and incomplete, but nevertheless containing a large 
amount of really genuine matter. I^othing can be more character- 
istic than the opening sentences. We give a translation, following 
as closely as possible the form of the original : " It is at times 
worth while to gain wealth by commerce, were it not so perilous ; 
or by usury, were it equally honourable. Our ancestors, however, 
held, and fixed by law, that a thief should be condemned to restore 
double, a usurer quadruple. We thus see how much worse they 
thought it for a citizen to be a money-lender than a thief. Again, 
when they praised a good man, they praised him as a good farmer, 
or a good husbandman. Men so praised were held to have received 
the highest praise. For myself, I think well of a merchant as a man 
of energy and studious of gain ; but it is a career, as I have said, 
that leads to danger and ruin. But farming makes the bravest 
men, and the sturdiest soldiers, and of all sources of gain is the 
surest, the most natural, and the least invidious, and those who 

1 xii . 11, 23, 



96 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

are "biisv witli it have iilie fewest bad thoughts." The sententious 
and dogmatic style of this preamble cannot fail to strike the reader ; 
but it is surpassed by many of the precepts which follow. Some 
of these contain pithy maxims of shrewd sense, e.g. " Patrem 
familias vendacem non emacem esse oportet." " Ita aedifices ne 
villa fundum quaerat, neve fundus villam." The Virgihan pre- 
scription, " Laudato ingentia rura : exiguam colito," is said to be 
drawn from Cato, though it does not exist in our copies. The 
treatment throughout is : nmethodical. If left by the author in 
its present form it represents the daily jotting down of thoughts 
on the subject as they occurred to hiuL 

In two points the writer appears in an unfavourable light — in 
his love of gain, and in his brutal treatment of his slaves. With 
him farming is no mere amusement, nor again is it mere labour. 
It is primarily and throughout a means of making money, and 
indeed the only strictly honourable one. However, Cato so far 
relaxed the strictness of this theory that he became "an ardent 
speculator in slaves, buildings, artificial lakes, and pleasure-grounds, 
tlie mercantile spirit being too strong within him to rest satisfied 
with the modest returns of his estate." As regarded slaves, the 
law considered them as chattels, and he followed the law to the 
letter. If a slave grew old or sick he was to be sold. If the 
weather hindered work he was to take his sleep then, and work 
doubl3 time afterwards. "Li order to prevent combinations 
among his slaves, their master assiduously sowed enmities and 
jealousies between them. He bought young slaves in their name, 
whom they were forced to train and sell for his benefit. When 
supping mth his guests, if any dish was carelessly dressed, he rose 
from table, and with a leathern thong administered the requisite 
number of lashes with his own hand." So pitilessly severe was 
he, that a slave who had concluded a purchase without his leave, 
hung himself to avoid his master's wrath. These incidents, 
some told by Plutarch, others by Cato himself, show the in- 
human side of Eoman life, and make it less hard to understand 
their treatment of vanquished kings and generals. Por the other 
sex Cato had little respecu. Women, he says, should be kept at 
home, and no Chaldaean or soothsayer be allowed to see them. 
Women are always running after superstition. His directions 
about the steward's wife are as follows. They are addressed to 
the steward : — " Let her fear you. Take care that she is not 
luxurious. Let her see as little as possible of her neighbours or 
any other female friends ; let her never invite them to your house ; 
let her never go out to supper, nor be fond of taking walks. Let 
her never offer sacrifice ] let her know that the master sacrifices 



CATO. 97 

for the whole family; let her be neat herself, and kee^J the 
country-house neat." Several sacrificial details are given in the 
treatise. We observe that they are all of the rustic order ; the 
master alone is to attend the city ceremonial. Among the different 
industries recommended, we are struck by the absence of wheat 
cultivation. The vineyard and the pasture chiefly engage atten- 
tion, though herbs and green produce are carefuUy treated. The 
reason is to be sought in the special nature of the treatise. It is 
not a general survey of agriculture, but merely a handbook of 
cultivation for a particular farm, that of Manlius or MalHus, and 
so probably unfit for wheat crops. Other subjects, as medicine, 
are touched on. But his prescriptions are confined to the rudest 
simples, to wholesome and restorative diet, and to incantations. 
These last have equal value assigned them with rational remedies. 
Whether Cato trusted them may well be doubted. He probably 
gave in such cases the popular charm-cure, simply from not having 
a better method of his own to propose. 

Another series of treatises were those addressed tc his son, in 
one of which, that on medicine, he charitably accuses the Greeks 
of an attempt to kill all barbarians by their treatment, and 
specially the Eomans, whom they stigmatise by the insulting 
name of Opici.^ " I forbid you, once for all, to have any deal- 
ings with physicians." Owing to their temperate and active life, 
the Eomans had for more than five hundred years existed without 
a physician within their walls. Cato's hostility to the profession, 
therefore, if not justifiable, was at least natural. He subjoins a 
list of simples by which he kept himself and his wife aHve and in 
health to a green old age.^ And observing that there are count- 
less signs of death, and none of health, he gives the chief marks 
by which a man apparently in health may be noted as unsound. 
In another treatise, on farming, also dedicated to his son, for 
whom he entertained a warm affection, and over whose education 
he sedulously watched, he says, — " Buy not what you want, but 
what you must have ; what you don't want is dear at a farthing, and 
what you lack borrow from yourself." Such is the homely wisdom 
which gained for Cato the proud title of Scqiieiis, by which, says 
Cicero,^ he was famiharly known. Other original works, the pro- 
duct of his vast experience, were the treatise on eloquence, of 

^ "OTTt/ces. Cato's superficial knowledge of Greek prevented him from 
knowing that this word to Greek ears conveys no insult, but is a mere 
ethnographic appellation. 

2 Plin. K H. xxix. 8, 15. 

2 De Sen. He gives the ground of it *^ quia muUarum rericm icsum 
habebat.*' 

Q 



98 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

which the pith is the following : " Eem tene : verba sequentur ; " 
" Take care of the sense : the sounds will take care of themselves." 
We can well believe that this excellent maxim ruled his own con- 
duct. The art of war formed the subject of another volume ; in 
this, too, he had abundant and faithful experience. An attempt 
to investigate the principles of jurisprudence, which was carried 
oat more "fully by his son,i and a short carmen de morihus or 
essay on conduct, completed the list of his paternal instructions. 
Why this was styled carman is not known. Some think it was 
written in Saturnian verse, others that its concise and oracular 
formulas suggested the name, since carw-en in old Latin is by no 
means confined to verse. It is from this that the account of the 
low estimation of poets in the early Eepubhc is taken. Besides 
these regular treatises we hear of letters,^ and aTrocfiOiyfjLaTa, or 
piihy sayings, put together like those of Bacon from divers 
sources. In after times Cato's own apophthegms were collected 
for publication, and under the name of Catonis didciy Avere much 
adnrred in the Middle Ages. We see that Cato's hterary labours 
were encyclopcedic. In this wide and ambitious sphere he was 
followed by Yarro, and still later by Celsus. Literary effort was 
now becoming general. Fulvius Nobilior, the patron of Ennius 
and adversary of Cato, published annals after the old plan of a 
calendar of years. Cassius Hemina and Calpurnius Piso, who 
were younger contemporaries, continued in the same track, and 
we hear of other minor historians. Cassius is mentioned more 
than once as " antiquissiwAcs audor^^ a term of compliment as 
well as chronological refe.ence.^ Of him Niebuhr says : " He 
wrote about Alba according to its ancient local chronology, and 
synchronised the earlier periods of Eome with the history of 
Greece. He treated of the age before the foundation of Eome, 
whence we have many statements of his about Siculian towns in 
Latium. The archa3ology of -the towns seems to have been his 
principal object. The fourth book of his work bore the title of 
Panicmn helium posterius, from which we infer that the last war 
with Carthage had not as yet broken out." 

About this epoch flourished Q. Eabius Maximus Servilianus, 
who is known to have written histories. He is supposed to be 
misonlled by Cicero,* Fabius Pictor, for Cicero mentions a work 
in Latin by the latter author, whereas it is certain that the old 
Eabius wrovo only in Greek. The best authorities now assume 
that Eabius Maximus, as a clansman and admirer of Pictor, trans- 

1 Cic. de Or. 11, 33, 142. 2 cic. de Off. i. 11, 10. 

3 Plin xiii. 37, 84, and xxix. 6. 

* De Or. ii. 12. See Nieb. lutrod. Lect. iv. 



CALPURNIUS PISO. 99 

lated Ms book into Latin to make it more widely known. The 
new work would thus be indifferently quoted as Fabius Pictor or 
Fabias Maximus. 

L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi Censorius (Cons. 133), well known 
as the adversary of the Gracchi, an eloquent and active man, and 
staunch adherent of the high aristocratic party, was also an able 
writer of history. That his conception of historical writing did 
not surpass that of his predecessors the annalists, is probable from 
the title of his work ; ^ that he brought to bear on it a very dif- 
ferent spirit seems certain from the quotations in Livy and 
Dionysius. One of the select few, in breadth of views as in posi- 
tion, he espoused the rationahstic opinions advocated by the 
Scipionic circle, and apphed them with more warmth than judg- 
ment to the ancient legends. Grote, Mebuhr, and others, have 
shown how unsatisfactory this treatment is ; illusion is lost with- 
out truth being f oujid ; nevertheless, the man who first honestly 
applies this method, though he may have ill success, makes an 
epoch in historical research. Cicero gives him no credit for style ; 
his annals (he says) are written in a barren way.^ The reader 
who wishes to read I^iebuhr's interesting judgment on his work 
and influence is referred to the Introductory Lectures on Roman 
History. In estimating the very different opinions on the ancient 
authors given in the (jlassic times, we should have regard to the 
divers standards from time to time set up. Cicero, for instance, 
has a great fondness for the early poets, but no great love for the 
prose writers, except the orators, nearly all of whom he loads 
with praise. Still, making allowance for this slight mental bias, 
his criticisms are of the utmost possible value. In the Augustan 
and early imperial times, antiquity was treated with much less 
reverence. Style was everything, and its deficiency could not be 
excused. And lastly, under the Antonines (and earlier ^), disgust 
at the false taste of the day produced an irrational reaction in 
favour of the archaic modes of thought and expression, so that 
Gellius, for instance, extols the simphcity, sweetness, or noble 
vigour of writings in which we, like Cicero, should see only jejune 
and rugged immaturity.* Pliny speaks of Piso as a weighty 
author {gravis auctor), and Pliny's penetration was not easily 
warped by style or want of style. We may conclude, on the 
whole, that Piso, though often misled by his want of imagina- 
tion, and occasionally by inaccuracy in regard to figures, ^ brought 
into Eoman history a rational method, not by any means so 

* Annates, also Commentarii. ^ Exiliter scriptos, Bnit. 27, 106. 

* See Quint, x. 1, passim. * Cell, vii 9, 1; speaks in this way of Piso, 

* See 11^. i. 55. 



100 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

original or excellent as that of Cato, bnt more on a level with the 
capacities of his countrymen, and infinitely more productive of 
imitation. 

The study of Greek rhetoric had by this time been cultivated at 
Rome, and the difficulty of composition being materially lightened ^ 
as well as its results made more pleasing, we are not surprised to 
find a number of authors of a somewhat more pretentious type. 
Vennonius, Clodius Licinus, C. Tannius, and Gellius are little 
more than names ; aU that is known of them wiU be found in 
TeufFel's repertory. They seem to have clung to the title of 
annalist though they had outgrown the character. There are, 
however, two names that cannot be quite passed over, those of 
Sempronius Asellio and Caelius Antipater. The former was 
military tribune at l^umantia (133 b.c.), and treated of that 
campaign at length in his work. He was killed in 99 b.c.^ but 
no event later than the death of Gracchus (121 b.c.) is recorded 
as from him. He had great contempt for the old annalists, and 
held their work to be a mere diary so far as form went ; he pro- 
fessed to trace the motives and efi"ects of actions, rather, however, 
with the object of stimulating public spirit than satisfying a 
legitimate thirst for knowledge. He had also some idea of the 
value of constitutional history, which may be due to the influence 
of Polybius, whose trained intelligence and philosophic grasp of 
events must have produced a great impression among those who 
knew or read him. 

We have now mentioned three historians, each of whom 
brought his original contribution to the task of narrating events. 
Cato rose to the idea of Rome as the centre of an Italian State ; 
he held any account of her institutions to be imperfect which did 
not also trace from their origin those of the kindred nations ; 
Piso conceived the plan of reducing the myths to historical 
probability, and Asellio that of tracing the moral causes that 
underlay outward movements. Thus we see a gi-eat advance in 
theory since the time, just a century earlier, when Fabius wrote 
his annals. "We now meet with a new element, that of rhetorical 
arrangement. !N'o one man is answerable for introducing this. 
It was in the air of Rome during the seventh century, and few 
were unafi'ected by it. Antipater is the first to whom rhetorical 
ornament is attributed by Cicero, though his attainments were of 
a humble kind.^ He was conspicuous for word painting. Scipio's 

1 Caf o. doubtless reflecting on the difficulty Avith wliicli he had formed his 
own style. 'Jnys " Litcrarum radices amarae, fritchts incicndiorcs." 
'- Liv. Ixxiv. Epit. 
^ -. cmlo ii\ I vit vchementius . , . agrestis ille quidem et hori^us, — Cift 



THE LATER ANNALISTS. 101 

voyage to Africa was treated by him in an imaginative theatrical 
fashion, noticed with disapproval by Livy.^ In other respects 
he seems to have been trustworthy and to have merited the 
honour he obtained of being abridged by J. Brutus. 

In the time of Sulla we hear of several historians who obtained 
celebrity. The first is Claudius Quadrigarius (fl. 100 B.C.). 
He dijEfers from all his predecessors by selecting as his starting- 
point the taking of Eome by the Gauls. His reason for so doing 
does him credit, viz. that there existed no documents for the 
earher period. ^ He hurried over the first three centuries, and as 
was usual among Eoman writers, gave a minute account of his 
own times, inserting documents and speeches. So archaic was 
his style that his fragments might belong to the age of Cato. For 
this reason, among others, Gellius^ (in whom they are found) 
greatly admires him. Though he outlived Sulla, and therefore 
chronologically might be considered as belonging to the Ciceronian 
period, yet the lack of finish in his own and his contemporaries' 
style, makes this the proper place to mention them. The perio.d,^ 
as distinct from the mere stringing together of clauses, was not 
understood even in oratory until Gracchus, and in history it was to 
appear still later. Cicero never mentions Claudius, nor Valerius 
Antias (91 B.C.), who is often associated with him. This writer, 
who has gained through Livy's page the unenviable notoriety of 
being the most lying of aU annalists, nevertheless obtained much 
celebrity. The chief cause of his deceptiveness was the fabrica- 
tion of circumstantial narrative, and the invention of exact 
numerical accounts. His work extended from the first my^^hical 
stories to his own day, and reached to at least seventy-five books. 
In his first decade Livy would seem to have followed him 
imphcitly. Then turning in his later books to better authorities, 
such as Polybius, and perceiving the immense discrepancies, he 
realised how he had been led astray, and in revenge attacked 
Antias throughout the rest of his work. Still the fact that he 
is quoted by Livy oftener than any other writer, shows that 
he was too well-known to be neglected, and perhaps Livy has 
exaggerated his defects. 

L. Cornelius Sisenna, (119-67 b.c.), better known as a states- 
man and grammarian, treated history with success. His daily con- 
verse with political life, and his thoughtful and studious liabits, 
combined to qualify him for this department. He was a conscientious 

leg. i, 2, 6. So *' addidit historiae maiorerfi sonum,^' id. de Or. ii, 
12, 54. 1 xxix. 27. 

2 Plut Numa. i. ^ix. 13. go Fronto ap. Gelt xiii. 29, 2. 

* Ae'lts KaTeffToauiAiinif as distinct from Ae|<s dpofxeyr], Ar. Khet. 



102 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

man, and tells how he pursued his work continuously, lest if he 
wrote by starts and snatches, he might pervert the reader's mind. 
His style, however, suffered by this, he became prolix ; this 
apparently is what Fronto means when he says " scripsit longinqiie." 
To later ^vriters he was interesting from his fondness for archaisms. 
Even in the senate he could not drop this affected habit. Alone of 
all the fathers he said adsentio for adsentior, and such phrases as 
^^vellicatim aut sultuatim scribendo^^ show an absurd straining 
after quaintness. 

C. LiciNius Macer (died 73 b.c.) the father of the poet Calvus, 
was the latest annalist of Eome. Cicero, who was his enemy, and 
his judge in the trial which cost him his life, criticises his defects 
both as orator and historian, with severity. Livy, too, implies 
that he was not always trustworthy ("Quaesita ea propriae 
familiae laus l(wiorem auctorem facit," ^) when the fame of his gens 
was in question, but on many points lie quotes him with approval, 
and shoAvs that he sought for the best materials, e.g. he drew from 
the lintei lihri,'^ the books of the magistrates,'^ the treaty with 
Ardea,* and where he differed from the general view, he gave his 
reasons for it. 

The extent of his researches is not known, but it seems likely 
that, alone of Eoman historians, he did not touch on the events 
of his day, the latest speech to which reference is made being the 
year 196 B.C. As he was an orator, and by no means a great one, 
being stigmatised as " loquacious " by Cicero, it is probable that 
his history suffered from a rhetorical colouring. 

Li reviewing the list of historians of the ante-classical period, 
we cannot form any high opinion of their merits. Fabius, Cincius, 
and Cato, who are the first, are also the greatest. The others 
seem to have gone aside to follow out their own special views, 
without possessing either accuracy of knowledge or grasp of mind 
sufficient to unite them with a general comprehensive treatment. 
The simultaneous appearance of so many writers of moderate ability 
and not widely divergent views, is a witness to the literary activity 
of the age, but does not say much for the force of its intellectual 
creations. 

Note. — The fragments of the historians have been carefully collected anri 
tdited with explanations and lists of authorities by Peter. {Vctcrum 
[listoricorum Romanorum Rclliquiae. Lipsiae, 1870.) 

^ vii 9. « fiiv xxiii. 2. * Id. xx. 8. * iv. 7. 



A.PPENDIX. 



103 



APPE^-DIX. 

On the Annales Pontificum, 
(Chiefly from Les Annales des Fon'^fes^ Le Clerc.) 



Tlie Annales, though not literature 
in the proper sense, were so impor- 
tant, as forming materials for it, that 
it may be well to give a short account 
of them. They were called Ponti- 
ficuni, Maximi, and sometimes Pub- 
lid, to distinguish them from the 
Annales of other towns, of families, 
or of historical writers. The term 
Annales, we may note en passant, 
was ordinarily applied to a narrative 
of facts preceding one's own time, 
Historiae being reserved for a con- 
temporary account (Gell. v. 8). 
But this of course was after its first 
sense was lost. In the oldest times, 
the Pontifices, as they were the law- 
yers, were in like manner the his- 
torians of Eome (Cic. de Or. ii, 12). 
Cicero and Yarro repeatedly consulted 
their records, which Cicero dates 
from the origin of the city, but Livy 
only from Ancus Martins (i. 32). 
Servius, apparently confounding 
them with the Fasti, declares that 
they put down the events of every 
day (ad Ae. i. 37a) ; and that they 
were divided into eighty books. 
Sempronius Asellio (Gefl. v. 18) says 
they mention bellum quo inltum 
consule, et qtio modo covfedum, et 
quis triumiJhans introierit, ami 
Cato ridicules the meagreness of 
their information. Nevertheless it 
was considered authentic. Cicero 
found the eclipse of the year 350 
duly registered ; Virgil and Ovid 
drew much of their archajologioal 
lore {annalibus eruta in-iscis, Ov. 
Fast i. 7.) and Livy his lists of 
prodigies from them. Besides these 
marvellous facts, others were doubt- 
less noticed, as new laws, dedication 
of temples or monuments, establish- 
ment of colonies, deaths of great 
men, erection of stntues, &c. ; but 
all with the utmost brevity. Unam 
dicendl laudem putant esse brevitaiem 



(De Or. ii. 12). Sentences occur in 
Livy which seem excerpts from them, 
e.g. (ii. 1). — His consulibus Fid- 
enae obssesae, Crusiumina capta, Prae- 
neste ab Latinis ad Roraanos dcscivit. 
Varro, in enumerating the gods whose 
altars were consecrated by Tatius, 
says (L. L. v. 101), ut Annales veteres 
nostri dicunt, and then names them. 
Pliny als,o quotes them expressly, 
but the word vetustissimi though 
they make it probable that the 
Pontifical Annals are meant, do not 
establish it beyond dispute (Plin. 
xxxiii. 6, xxxiv. 11). 

It is probable, as has been said in 
this work, that the Annales Ponti- 
ficwin were to a great extent, though 
not altogether, destroyed in the Gallic 
invasion. But Kome was not the 
only city that had Annales. Pro- 
bably all the chief towns of the 
Oscan, Sabine, and Umbrian territory 
had them. Cato speaks of Antenma 
as older than Home, no doubt from 
its records. Varro drew from the 
archives of Tusculum (L. L. vi. 16), 
Praeneste had its Pontifical Annals 
(Cic de Div. ii, 41), and Anagnia its 
libri lintei(¥ ronto. Ep. ad Ant. iv. 4). 
Etruria beyond question possessed an 
extensive religious literature, with 
which much history must have been 
mingled. And it is reasonable to 
suppose, as Livy implies, that the 
educated Komans were familiar with 
it. From this many valuable facts 
would be preserved. When the 
Komans captured a city, they brought 
over its gods with them, and it is 
possible, its sacred records also, since 
their respect for what was religious 
or ancient, was not limited to their 
own nationality, but extended to 
most of those peoples with whom 
they were brought in contact. From 
all these considerations it is probable 
that a considerable portion of historic 



104 



HISTOHY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 



record was preserved after the burn- 
ing of the city, whether from the 
Annals" themselves, or from portions 
of them inscribed on bronze crstone, 
or from those of other states, which 
was accessible to, and used by Cato, 
Polybius, Varro, Cicero, and Verrius 
Flaccus. It is also probable that 
these records were collected into a 
work, and that this work, while 
modernized by its frequent revisions, 
nevertheless preserved a great deal 
of original and genuine annalistic 
chronicle. 

The Annates must be distinguished 
from the Lihri Pmitificum, which 
seem to have been a manual of the 
Jus Pontificale. Cicero places them 
between the Jus Civile and the 
Twelve Tables (De Or i. 43.) The 
Lihri Pontificii may have been the 
same, but probably the term, when 
correctly used, meant the ceremonial 
ritual for the Saccrdotes, fiamincs, 
&c. This general term included the 
more special ones of Lihri sacrorum, 
saccrdotuin, haruspicini, &c. Some 
have confounded with the Annulcs a 
different sort of record altogether, 
the Indigitamenta, or ancient for- 
mulae of prayer or incantation, and 
the Axamentaf to which class the 



song of the Arral Brothers is re- 
ferred. 

As to the amount of historical 
matter contained in the Annals, it is 
impossible to pronounce with con- 
fidence. Their falsification through 
family and patrician pride is well 
known. But the earliest historians 
must have possessed sufficient insight 
to distinguish the obviously fabulous. 
AVe cannot suspect Cato of placing 
implicit faith in mythical accounts. 
He was no friend to the aristocratic 
families or their records, and took 
care to check them by the rival 
records of other Italian tribes. Sein- 
pronius Asellio, in a passage already 
alluded to (ap. Cell. v. 18), dis- 
tinguishes the annalistic style as 
])nerile {fahulaspuerisnarrare)', the 
historian, he insists, should go 
beneath the surface, and understand 
what he relates. On comparing the 
early chronicles of Rome with those 
of St Bertin and St Denys of France, 
there appears no advantage in a his- 
torical point of view to be claimed 
by the latter ; both contain many 
real events, though both seek to 
glorify the origin of the nation and 
its rulers by constant instances of 
(liYine or saintly intervention. 



CHAPTEE X 

The History op Oratory before Cicero. 

As the spiritual life of a people is reflected in their poetry, so 
their living voice is heard in their oratory. Oratory is the child 
of freedom. Under the despotisms of the East it could have no 
existence ; under every despotism it withers. The more truly free 
a nation is, the greater will its oratory be. In no counti-y was 
there a grander field for the growth of oratorical genius than in 
Kome. The two countries that approach nearest to it in this 
respect are beyond doubt Athens and England. In both eloquence 
has attained its loftiest height, in the one of popular, in the other 
of patrician excellence. The eloquence of Demosthenes is popular 
in the noblest sense. It is addressed to a sovereign people who 
knew that they were sovereign. IS'either to deliberative nor to 
executive did they for a moment delegate that supreme power 
which it dehghted them to exercise. He that had a measure or 
a bill to propose had only to persuade them that it was good, and 
the measure passed, the bill became law. But the audience he 
addressed, though a popular, was by no means an ordinary one. 
It was fickle and capricious to a degree exceeding that of all other 
popular assemblies ; it was critical, exacting, intellectual, in a still 
higher degree. ]^o audience has been more swayed by passion ; 
none has been less swayed by the pretence of it. Always acces- 
sible to flattery, Athens counts as her two greatest orators the two 
men who never stooped to flatter her. The regal tones of Pericles, 
the prophetic earnestness of Demosthenes, in the response which 
each met, bear witness to the greatness of those who heard them. 
Even Cleon owed his greatest triumphs to the plainness with 
which he inveighed against the people's faults. Intolerant of 
inelegance and bombast, the Athenians required not only gi-aceful 
speech, but speech to the point. Hence Demosthenes is of all 
ancient orators the most business-like. Of all ancient orators, 
it has been truly said he would have met with the best hearing 
from the House of Commons. Nevertheless there is a great differ- 



106 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

enoe lietween Athenian and English eloquence. The former was 
exclusively popular; the latter, in the strictest sense, is hardly 
popular at aU. The dignified representatives of our lower house 
need no such appeals to popular passion as the Athenian assembly 
required ; only on questions of patriotism or principle would they 
be tolerated. Still less does emotion govern the sedate and 
mascuhne eloquence of our upper house, or the strict and closely- 
reasoned pleadings of our courts of law. Its proper field is in the 
addresses of a popular member to one of the great city constitu- 
encies. The best speeches addressed to hereditary legislators or 
to elected representatives necessarily involve different features 
from those which characterised orations addressed directly to the 
entire nation assembled in one place. If oratory has lost in fire, 
it has gained in argument. In its political sphere, it shows a 
clearer grasp of the public interest, a more tenacious restriction to 
practical issues ; in its judicial sphere, a more complete abandon- 
ment of prejudice and passion, and a subordination, immeasurably 
gi'eater than at Athens, to the authority of written law. 

Let us now compare the general features of Greek and English 
eloquence with those of Rome. Roman eloquence had this in 
common with Greek, that it was genuinely popular. In their 
comitia the people were supreme. The orator who addressed 
them must be one who by passion could enkindle passion, and 
guide for his own ends the impulses of a vast multitude. But 
how different was the multitude ! Eickle, impressionable, vain ; 
patriotic too in its way, and not without a rough idea of justice. 
So far like that of Greece ; but here the resemblance ends. The 
mob of Rome, for in the times of real popular eloquence it had 
come to that, was rude, fierce, bloodthirsty : where Athens called 
for grace of speech, Rome demanded vehemence ; where Athens 
looked for glory or freedom, Rome looked for increase of dominion, 
and the wealth of conquered kingdoms for her spoil. That in 
spite of their fierce and turbulent audience the great Roman 
orators attained to such impressive grandeur, is a testimony to the 
greatness of the senatorial system which reared them. In some 
respects the eloquence of Rome bears greater resemblance to that 
of England. For several centuries it was chiefly senatorial. The 
people intrusted their powers to the Senate, satisfied that it acted 
for the best ; and during this period eloquence was matured. That 
special quality, so weU named by the Romans gravitas, which 
at Athens was never reached, but which has again appeared in 
England, owed its de\elopment to the august discipline of the 
Senate. Well might Cineas call this body an assembly of kings. 
Kever have patriotism, tradition, order, expediency, been so 



EOMAN ORATOEY. 107 

powerfully represented as there ; never have change, passion, or 
fear had so little place. We can well believe that every effective 
speech began with the words, so familiar to us, maiores nostri 
voluerunt, and that it ended as it had begun. The aristocratic 
stamp necessarily impressed on the debates of such an assembly 
naturally recalls our own House of Lords. But the freedom of 
personal invective was far wider than modern courtesy would 
tolerate. And, moreover, the competency of the Senate to decide 
questions of peace or war threw into its discussions that strong 
party spirit which is characteristic of our Lower House. Thus 
the senatorial oratory of Eome united the characteristics of that 
of both our chambers. It was at once majestic and vehement, 
patriotic and personal, proud of traditionary prestige, but animated 
with the consciousness of real power. 

In judicial oratory the Eomans, like the Greeks, compare 
unfavourably with us. With more eloquence they had less 
justice. Nothing sets antiquity in a less prepossessing light than 
a study of its criminal trials ; nothing seems to have been less 
attainable in these than an impartial sifting of evidence. The 
point of law is obscured among overwhelming considerations from 
outside. If a man is clearly innocent, as in the case of Eoscius, 
the enmity of the great makes it a severe labour to obtain an 
acquittal ; if he is as clearly guilty (as Cluentius would seem to 
have been), a skiKul use of party weapons can prevent a convic- 
tion. ^ The judiccs in the public trials (which must be distin- 
guished from civil causes tried in the praetor's court) were at 
first taken exclusively from the senators. Gracchus (122 b.c.) 
transferred this privilege to the Equites ; and until the time of 
Sulla, who once more reinstated the senatorial class (81 B.C.), 
fierce contests raged between the two orders. Eompey (55 B.C.), 
foUomng an enactment of Cotta (70 B.C.), threw the office open 
to the three orders of Senators, Knights, and Tribuni Aerarii, but 
fixed a high property qualification. Augustus added a fourth 
deciiria from the lower classes, and Caligula a fifth, so that Quin- 
tilian could speak of a juryman as ordinarily a man of Httle 
intelligence and no legal or general knowledge. ^ 

This would be of comparatively smaE importance if a presiding 

1 The evil results of a judicial system like that of Rome are shown by the 
lax views of so good a man as Quintilian, who compares deceiving the judges 
to a painter producing illusions by perspective (ii. 17, 21). "Nee Cicero, 
cum se tenebras ofl'udisse iudicibus in causa Ciuentii gloriatus est, nihil ipse 
vidit. Et pictor, cum vi artis suae efficit, ut quaedam eminere io opere, 
quaedam recessisse credamus, ipse ea plana esse non nescit," 

2 X. 1. 32. 



108 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

judge of lofty qualifications guided, as with us, the minds of the 
jury through the mazes of argument and sophistry, and set the 
real issue plainly before them. But in Rome no such prerogative 
rested with the presiding judge, ^ who merely saw that the pro- 
visions of the law under which the trial took place were complied 
with. The judges, or rather jurors, were, in Kome as in Athens,' 
both from theii- number and their divergent interests, open to in- 
fluences of prejudice or corruption, only too often unscrupulously 
employed, from which our system is altogether exempt. In the 
later republican period it was not, of course, ignorance (the jurors 
being senators or equites) but bribery or partisanship that dis- 
graced the decisions of the bench. Senator and eques unceasingly 
accused each other of venality, and each was beyond doubt right 
in the charge he made.^ In circumstances like these it is evident 
that dexterous manipulation or passionate pleading must take the 
place of legitimate forensic oratory. Magnificent, therefore, as are 
the efforts of the great speakers in this field, and nobly as they 
often rise above the corrupt practice of their time, it is impossible 
to shut our eyes to the iniquities of the procedure, and to help 
regretting that talent so glorious was so often compelled either to 
fail or to resort to unworthy methods of success. 

At Rome public speaking prevailed from the first. In every 
department of life it was necessary for a man to express in clear 
and vigorous language the views he recommended. Not only the 
senator or magistrate, but the general on the field of battle had to 
be a speaker. On his return from the campaign eloquence became 
to him what strategy had been before. It was the great path to 
civil honours, and success was not to be won without it. There 
is little doubt that the Romans struck out a vein of strong native 
eloquence before the introduction of Greek letters. Readiness of 
speech is innate in the Italians as in the French, and the other 
qualities of the Romans contributed to enhance this natural gift. 
Few remains of this native oratory are left, too few to judge by. 
We must form our opinion upon that of Cicero, who, basing his 
judgment on its acknowledged political effects, pronounces strongly 
in its favour. The measures of Brutus, of Valerius Poplicola, and 
others, testify to their skill in oratory;* and the great honour in 
which the orator was always held,^ contrasting with the low posi' 
tion accorded to the poet, must have produced its natural result. 

^ See the article Judicia Puhliea in Eamsay's Manual of Roman Antiquities. 

* The reader is referred to the admirable account of the Athenian diccu* 
teries in Grote's History of Greece. 

3 See Forsyth's Life of Cicero, ch. 3 

* Brut xiv. 63. » Quint, ii. 16, 8. 



THE EARLY ORATOES. 109 

But though the practice of oratory was cultivated it was not reduced 
to an art. Technical treatises were the work of Greeks, and Romans 
under Greek influence. In the early period the " spoken word " 
was all-important. Even the writing down of speeches after 
delivery was rarely, if ever, resorted to. The fii'st known instance 
occurs so late as the war with Pyrrhus, 280 B.C., when the old 
censor Appius committed his speech to writing, which Cicero says 
that he had read. The only exception to this rule seems to have 
been the funeral orations, which may have been written from the 
first, but were rarely published owing to the youth of those who 
delivered them. The aspirant to public honours generally began 
his career by composing such an oration, though in later times a 
public accusation was a more favourite debut. Eesides Appius's 
speech, we hear of one by Eabius Cunctator, and of another by 
Metellus, and we learn from Ennius that in the second Punic war 
(204 B.C.) M. Cornelius Cethegus obtained the highest renown foi 
his persuasive eloquence. 

** Additur orator Cornelius suaviloqnenti 
Ore Celhegns ... is dictus popularihus ohm . . • 
Flos delibatus populi Suadaeque medulla. "^ 

The first name on which we can pronounce with confidence is 
that of Cato. This great man was the first oratoi as he was the 
greatest statesman of his time. Cicero^ praises him as dignified in 
commendation, pitiless in sarcasm, pointed in phraseology, subtle 
in argument. Of the 150 speeches extant in Cicero's time there 
was not one that was not stocked with brilliant and pithy sayings ; 
and though perhaps they read better in the shape of extracts, still 
all the excellences of oratory were found in them as a whole ; and 
yet no one could be found to study them. Perhaps Ciceio's language 
betrays the warmth of personal admiration, especially as in a later 
passage of the same dialogue^ he makes Atticus dissent altogether 
from his own view. " I highly approve (he says) of the speeches 
of Cato as compared with those of his own date, for though quite 
unpolished they imply some original talent . . . but to s]3eak of 
him as an orator equal to Lysias would indeed be pardonable irony 
if we were in jest, but you cannot expect to approve it seriously 
to me and Brutus." !N'o doubt Atticus's judgment is based on too 
liigh a standard, for high finish was impossible in the then state of 
the language. Still Cato wrote probably in a designedly lude style 
through his horror of Greek affectation. He is rej^orted to liave 
said in his old age (150 B.C.), *' Caussarum ilUisirium quascuiique 

^ TleiQi} quam vocant Graeci, cuius effector est Orator, lianc Suadtiin 
appellavit Ennius. — Cic. Br. 68. 
2 Brut. 65. » Brut. 293. 



110 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

defew^' nunc cum maxime conficio orationes^''^ and tliese "written 
spgeclies were no doubt improvements on those actually delivered, 
especially as Valerius Maximus says of liis literary labours, ^ " Cato 
Graecis Uteris erudiri concupimt, quam sero inde cognoscimus quod 
etiam Latinaspaenc iam senex didicerit. His eloquence extendi ^d 
to every sort ; lie was a successful patronus in many private trials ; 
lie was a noted and most formidable accuser ; in public trials we 
find him continually defending himself, and always witli success ; 
as the advocate or opponent of great political measures in the 
senate or assembly lie was at his greatest. Many titles of delibera- 
tive speeches remain, e.g. " de rege Attalo et vectigalihus Asiae,'' 
"ut plura aera equestria fierent" ^^ aediles plehis sacrosandos 
esse" " de dote " (an attack upon the luxury of women), and others. 
His chief characteristics were condensed force, pregnant brevity, 
strong common sense, galling asperity. His orations were neglected 
for near a century, but in the Claudian era began to be studied, 
and were the subjects of commentary until the time of Servius, 
who speaks of his periods as ill-balanced and unrhythmical 
(confragosa).'^ There is a most caustic fragment preserved in 
rronto"* taken from the speech de sumptu suo, recapitulating his 
benefits to the state, and the ingratitude of those who had profited 
by them ; and another from his speech against Minucius Thermus, 
who had scourged ten men for some tiivial offence,^ which in its 
sarcasm, its vivid and yet redundant language, recalls the manner 
of Cicero. 

In Cato's time we hear of Ser. Fulvius and L. Cotta, Scipio 
Africanus and Sulpicius Gallus, all of whom were good though 
not first-rate speakers. A little later Laelius and the younger 
Scipio (185-129 b.c.), whose speeches were extant in the 
time of Cicero,^ and their contemporaries, followed Cato's ex- 
ample and wrote down what they had delivered. It is not clear 
whether their motive was literary or political, but more probably 
the latter, as party feeling was so high at Rome that a powerful 
speech might do good work afterwards as a pamphlet.'' From the 
passages of Scipio Aemilianus which we possess, we gather that he 
strove to base his style on Greek models. In one we find an 
elaborate dilemma, with a taunting question repeated after each 
deduction ; in another we find Greek terms contemptuously intro- 

1 Cic. Sen. ii. 38. 2 y^^i 7^ i 

3 Diom. ii. p. 468. * Ep. ad. Anton, i. 2, p. 99. 

5 Jordan, p. 41. 6 Bi^ut. 82. 

^ Wordsworth, gives extracts from Aemilius Paulus Macedoiiicus (228-160 
B C), C. Titius (161 B.C.), Metellus Macedonicus (140 B.C.), the latter appa- 
i-ciitly Tioderiiised. 



LAELIUS. Ill 

duced irnicli as they are centuries after in Juvenal ; in another we 
have a truly patrician epigram. Being asked his opinion about 
the death of Gracchus, and replying that the act was a righteous 
one, the people raised a shout of defiance, — Taceojnt^ inquit, quihus 
Italia noverca non mater est, quos ego sub corona vendidi — " Bo 
silent, you to whom Italy is a stepdame not a mother, whom I 
myseK have sold at the hammer of the auctioneer." 

Laelius, surnamed Sapiens, or the philosopher (cons. 140), is 
well known to readers of Cicero as the chief speaker in the ex- 
quisite dialogue on friendship, and to readers of Horace as the 
friend of Scipio and Lucilius.^ Of his relative excellence as an 
orator, Cicero speaks with caution. ^ He mentions the popular 
preference for Laelius, hut apparently his own judgment incHnes' 
the other way. "It is the manner of men to dislike one man 
excelling in many things. Now, as Africanus has no rival in 
martial renown, though Laelius gained credit by his conduct of 
the war with Yiriathus, so as regards genius, learning, eloquence, 
and wisdom, though both are put in the first rank, yet aU men 
are willing to place Laelius above Scipio." It is certain that 
Laelius's style was much less natural than that of Scipio. He 
affected an archaic vocabulary and an absence of ornament, which, 
however, was a habit too congenial at all times to the Eoman 
mind to call down any severe disapproval. What Laehus lacked 
was force. On one occasion a murder had been committed in the 
forest of Sila, which the consuls were ordered to investigate. A 
company of pitch manufacturers were accused, and Laelius under- 
took their defence. At its conclusion the consuls decided on a 
second hearing. A few days after Laelius again pleaded, and 
this time with an elegance and completeness that left nothing to 
be desired. Still the consuls were dissatisfied. On the accused 
begging Laehus to make a third speech, he replied : " Out of con- 
sideration for you I have done my best. You should now go to 
Ser. Galba, who can defend you with greater warmth and vehemence 
than I." Galba, from respect to *Laelius, was unwilhng to under- 
take the case ; but, having finally agreed, he spent the short 
time that was left in getting it by heart, retiring into a vaulted 
chamber with some highly educated slaves, and remaiuing at work 
till after the consuls had taken their seat. Being sent for he at 
last came out, and, as Rutilius the narrator and eye-witness 
declared, with such a heightened colour and triumph in hi,^ eyes 
that he looked like one who had already won his cause. Laelius 

1 He and Scipio are thus admirably characterised by Horace:— 

" Virtus Scipiadae et mitis sapientia Laeli." 
« Brut. xxi. 83. 



112 HISTOEY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

himself was present. Tlie advocate spoke with such force and 
weight that scarcely an argument passed unapplauded. Not only 
were the accused released, but they met on all hands with sym- 
pathy and compassion. Cicero adds that the slaves who had 
helped in the consultation came out of it covered with bruises, 
such was the vigour of body as well as mind that a Roman brought 
to bear on his case, and on the unfortunate instruments of its pre- 
paration.^ 

Galea (180-136 B.C.?) was a man of violence and bad faith, 
not for a moment to be compared to Laelius. His infamous 
cruelty to the Lusitanians, one of the darkest acts iu all history, 
has covered his name with an ineffaceable stain. Cato at eighty- 
five years of age stood forth as his accuser, but owing to his 
specious art, and to the disgrace of Eome, he was acquitted. ^ 
Cicero speaks of him as peringeniosus sed non satis doctus, and 
says that he lacked perseverance to improve his speeches from a 
literary point of view, being contented with forensic success. 
Yet he was the first to apply the right sort of treatment to oratori- 
cal art; he introduced digressions for ornament, for pathos, for 
information ; but as he never re-wrote his speeches, they remained 
unfinished, and were soon forgotten— i/aTzc igitur oh caussam 
videtur Laelii mens sj^irare etiam in scriptis, Galhae autem vis 
occidisse. 

Laelius had embodied in his speeches many of the precepts of 
the Stoic philosophy. He had been a friend of the celebrated 
Panaetius (186-126 B.C.) of Rhodes, to whose lectures he sent his 
own son-in-law, and apparently others too. Eloquence now began 
to borrow philosophic conceptions ; it was no longer merely 
practical, but admitted of illustration from various theoretical 
sources. It became the ambition of cultivated men to fuse 
enhghtened ideas into the substance of their oratory. Instances 
of this are found in Sp. Mummius, Aemilius Lepidus, C. Fannius, 
and the Augur Mucins Scaevola, and perhaps, though it is 
difficult to say, in Carbo and the two Gracchi These are the 
next names that claim our notice. 

Caebo (164-119 B.C.), the supporter first of the Gracchi, and 
then of their murderers, was a man of the most worthless char- 
acter, but a bold speaker, and a successful patron. In his time 
the quaestiones perpetuae ^ were constituted, and thus he had an 

1 Cic. Brut, xxiii. The narrator from whom Cicero heard it was Eutiliiis 
Rufus. 

2 He did not attempt to justify himself, but by paradinoj his little chil- 
dren he appealed with success to the compassion of his judges ! 

3 In 149 B.C. Piso established a permanent commission to sit throughout 
the year for hearing all charges under the law de Bepetundis. Before this 



THE GKACCHI. 113 

immense opportunity of enlarging his forensic experience. He 
gained the reputation of being the first pleader of his day ; he 
was fluent, witty, and forcible, and was noted for the strength 
and sweetness of his voice. Tacitus also mentions him with 
respect in his dialogue de Oratoribus?- 

The two Gracchi were no less distinguised as orators than as 
champions of the oppressed. Tiberius (169-133 B.C.) served his 
first campaign with Scipio in Africa, and was present at the fall 
of Carthage. His personal friendship for the great soldier was 
cemented by Scipio 's union with his only sister. The father of 
Gracchus was a man of sterhng worth and considerable oratorical 
gifts; his mother's virtue, dignity, and wisdom are proverbial. 
Her hterary accomplishments were extremely great ; she educated 
her sons in her own studies, and watched their progress with 
more than a preceptor's care. The short and unhappy career of 
this virtuous but imprudent man is too well known to need 
allusion here; his eloquence alone will be shortly noticed. It 
was formed on a careful study of Greek authors. Among his 
masters was Diophanes of Mitylene, who dwelt at Eome, and 
paid the penalty of his life for his friendship for his pupil. 
Tiberius's character was such as to call for the strongest expres- 
sions of reverence even from those who disapproved his political 
conduct. Cicero speaks of him as homo sandissimus, and Velleius 
Paterculus says of him, ^'vita innocent issimus, ingenio Jlorentissi- 
mus, proposito sandissimus, tantis denlque ornatus virtutihus, 
quantas perfeda et natura et industria mortalis conditio reeiprt.^^ 
His appearance formed an epoch in eloquence. " The Gracchi 
employed a far freer and easier mode of speech than any of 
their predecessors." ^ This may be accounted for partly through 
the superiority of their inherited talent and subsequent education, 
but is due far more to the deep conviction which stirred their 
heart and kindled their tongue. Cato alone presents the spectacle 
of a man deeply impressed with a political mission and carrying it 
into the arena of poHtical conflict, but the inspiration of Gracchu? 
was of a far higher order than that of the harsh censor. It was in 
its origin moral, depending on the eternal principles of right and 
wrong, not on the accielent of any particular state or party in it. 
Hence the loftiness of his speech, from which sarcasm and even 
passion were absent. In estimating the almost ideal character of 
the enthusiasm which fired him we cannot forget that his mother 

every case was tried by a special commission. Under Sulla all crimes -were 
broujrht under the jurisdiction of their respective commissions, which estab- 
lished the complete system of courts of law. 
* Ch. 34. 2 Brut. 97, 333. 

H 



114 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

was the daughter of Scipio, of him who believed himself the 
special favourite of heaven, and the communicator of divinely- 
sent ideas to the world. Unhappily we have no fragments of the 
orations of Gracchus ; the more brilliant fame of his brother has 
eclipsed his literary renown, but we may judge of their special 
features by those of their author's character, and be sure that 
while lacking in genius they were temperate, earnest, pure, and 
classical. In fact the Gracchi may be called the founders of 
classical Latin. That subdued power whose subtle influence 
penetrates the mind and vanquishes the judgment is unknown 
in literature before them. "Whenever it appears it marks the rise 
of a high art, it answers to the vis temperata which Horace so 
warmly commends. The younger son of Cornelia, C. Gracchus 
(154-121 B.C.), was of a different temper from his brother. He 
was less of the moralist, more of the artist. His feeling was more 
intense but less profound. His brother's loyalty had been to the 
state alone ; his was given partly to the state, partly to the shade 
of his brother. In nearly every speech, in season and out of 
season, he denounced his murder. ^^ Pessimi Tiberium meum 
fratrem, optimum virum, interfecerunt." Such is the burden of 
his eloquence. If in Tiberius we see the impressive calmness of 
reasoned conviction, in Caius we see the splendid impetuosity of 
chivalrous devotion. And yet Caius was, without doubt, the 
greater statesman of the two. The measures, into which hio 
brother was as it were forced, were by him well understood and 
dehberately planned. They amounted to nothing less than a sub- 
version of the existing state. The senate destroyed meant 
Gracchus sovereign. Under the guise of restoring to the people 
their supreme power, he paved the way for the long succession of 
tyrants that followed. His policy mingled patriotism and revenge. 
The corruption and oppression that everywhere marked the 
oligarchical rule roused his just indignation; the death of his 
brother, the death he foresaw in store for himself, stirred him into 
unholy vengeance. Many of his laws were well directed.- The 
liberal attitude he assumed towards the provinces, his strong 
desire to satisfy the just claims of the Itahans to citizenship, his 
breaking down the exclusive administration of justice, these are 
monuments of his far-seeing statesmanship. But his vindictive 
legislation with regard to Popillius Laenas, and to Octavius (from 
which, however, his mother's counsel finally deterred him), and 
above all his creation of the curse of Eome, a hungry and brutal 
proletariate, by largesses of corn, present his character as a public 
man in darker colours. As Mommsen says, " Eight and wrong, 
fortune' and misfortune, were so inextricably blended in him that 



THE GRACCHI. 115 

it may well beseem history in this case to reserve her judgment. "^ 
The discord of his character is increased by the story that an 
inward impulse dissuaded him at first from public life, that agree- 
ably to its monitions he served as Quaestor abroad, and pursued for 
some years a military career ; but after a time his brother's spirit 
haunted him, and urged him to return to Eome and offer his life 
upon the altar of the great cause. This was the turning-point of 
his career. He returned suddenly, and from that day became the 
enemy of the senate, the avenger of his brother, and the champion 
of the multitude. His oratory is described as vehement beyond 
example ; so carried away did he become, that he found it neces- 
sary to have a slave behind him on the rostra, who, by playing a 
flute, should recall him to moderation. ^ Cicero, who strongly 
condemned the man, pays the highest tribute to his genius, say- 
ing in the Brutus : "Of the loftiest talent, of the most burning 
enthusiasm, carefully taught from boyhood, he yields to no man 
in richness and exuberance of diction." To which Erutus assents, 
adding, " Of all our predecessors he is the only one whose works 
I read." Cicero replies, "You do right in reading him; Latin 
literature has lost irreparably by his early death. I know not 
whether he would not have stood above every other name. His 
language is noble, Ms sentiments profound, his whole style grave. 
His works lack the finishing touch ; many are admirably begun, 
few are thoroughly complete. He of all speakers is the one that 
should be read by the young, for not only is he fit to sharpen 
talent, but also to feed and nourish a natural gift."-^ 

One of the great peculiarities of ancient eloquence was the 
frequent opportunity afforded for self-recommendation or seK- 
praise. That good taste or modesty which shrinks from men- 
tioning its own merits was far less cultivated in antiquity than 
ncfw. Men accepted the principle not only of acting but of 
speaking for their own advantage. This gave greater zest to a 
debate on public questions, and certainly sharpened the orator's 
powers. H a man had benefited the state he was not ashamed 
to blazon it forth ; if another in injuring the state had injured 
him, he did not altogether sacrifice personal invective to patriotic 
indignation.* The frequency of accusations made this " art of self- 
defence " a necessity — and there can be no doubt the Eoman people 
listened with admiration to one who was at once bold and skilful 

1 Hist. Eom. bk. iv. ch. iii. ^ cic. de Or. HI. Ix. 225. 

^ Brut, xxxiii. 125. 

^ The same will be observed in Greece. "We are apt to think that the 
epnce devoted to personal abr.se in the De Cormia is too lonfj. But it was 
the imiversal custom. 



b 



116 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

enough, to sound Ms own praises well. Cicero's excessive vanity led 
liim to overdo his part, and to nauseate at times even well-disposed 
hearers. From the fragments of Gracchus' speeches that remain 
(unhappily very few) we should gather that in asserting himself 
he was without a rival. The mixture of simplicity and art 
removes him at once from Cato's bald literalism and Cicero's 
egotism. It was, however, in impassioned attack that Gracchus 
rose to his highest tones. The terms GracrM impetum,'^ tumul- 
tuator Gracchus,^ among the Latin critics, and similar ones from 
Plutarch and Dio among the Greeks, attest the main character of 
his eloquence. His very outward form paralleled the restlessness 
of his soul. He moved up and down, bared his arm, stamped 
violently, made fierce gestures of defiance, and acted through real 
emotion as the trained rhetoricians of a later age strove to act by 
rules of art. His accusation of Piso is said to have contained 
more maledictions than charges; and we can believe that a 
temperament so fervid, when once it gave the reins to passion, 
lost all self-command. It is possible we might think less highly 
of Gracchus's eloquence than did the ancients, if his speeches 
remained. Their lack of finish and repose may have been 
unnoticed by critics who could hurl themselves in thought not 
merely into the feeling but the very place which he occupied ; but 
to moderns, whose sympathy with a state of things so opposite 
must needs be imperfect, it is possible that their power might not 
have compensated for the absence of relief. Important fragments 
from the speech apud Censor es (124 b.c.), from that de legihus a 
se promulgatis (123 B.C.), and from that de Mitliridate (123 B.C.), 
are given and commented on by Wordsworth.] 

Among the friends and opponents of the Gracchi were many 
orators whose names are given by Cicero with the minute care 
of a sympathising historian ; but as few, if any, remains of their 
speeches exist, it can serve no purpose to recount the list. Three 
celebrated names may be mentioned as filling up the interval 
between C. Gracchus and M. Antonius. The first of these is 
Aemilius Scaurus (163-90? b.c.), the haughty chief of the senate, 
the unscrupulous leader of the oligarchical party. His oratory is 
described by Cicero^ as conspicuous for dignity and a natural but 
irresistible air of command ; so that when he spoke for a defen- 
dant, he seemed like one who gave his testimony rather than one 
who pleaded. This want of flexibility unfitted him for success at 
the bar ; accordingly, we do not find that he was m^uch esteemed 
as a patron ; but for summing up the debates at the Senate, or 
delivering an opinion on a great public question, none could be 

1 Tac. Or. 26. 2 Pronto, Ep. ad Ant. p. 114. » Cic. Brut. xxix. 



. EUTILIUS — CATULUS. 117 

more impressive. Speeches of his were extant in Cicero's time ; 
also an autobiography, which, like Caesar's Commentaries, was 
intended to put his conduct in the most favourable light ; these, 
however, were little read. Scaurus hved to posterity, not in his 
writings, but in his example of stern constancy to a cause. ^ 

A man in many ways resembling him but of purer conduct, was 
RuTiLius (158-78 B.C.), who is said by Cicero to have been a splendid 
example of many-sided culture. He was a scholar, a philosopher, 
a jmist of high repute, a historian, and an orator, though the 
severity of the Stoic sect, to which he adhered, prevented his 
striving after oratorical excellence. His impeachment for mal- 
versation in Asia, and unjust condemnation to banishment, reilcct 
strongly on the formation of the Eoman law-courts. His pride, 
however, was in part the cause of his exile. For had he chosen 
to employ Antonius or Crassus to defend him, an acquittal would at 
least have been possible ; but conscious of rectitude, he refused any 
patron, and relied on his own dry and jejune oratory, and such assist- 
ance as his young friend Cotta could give. Sulla recalled him from 
Smyrna, whither he had repaired after his condemnation ; but Euti- 
lius refused to return to the city which had unjustly expelled him. 

Among the other aristocratic leaders, Catulus, the "noble 
colleague" of Marius^ (cons. 102), must be mentioned. He was 
not a Stoic, and therefore was free to chose a more ornamental 
method of speaking than Eutilius. Cicero, with the partiality of 
a senatorial advocate, gives him very high praise. " He was 
educated not in the old rough style, but in that of our own day, 
or something more finished and elegant still. He had a wide 
acquaintance with literature, the highest courtesy of life and 
manners as well as of discourse, and a pure stream of genuine 
Latin eloquence. This is conspicuous in all his works, but most 
of all, in his autobiography, written to the poet A. Eurius, in a 
style full of soft grace recalling that of Xenophon, but now, 
unhappily, httle, if at all, read. In pleading he was successful 
but not eminent. "W^en heard alone, he seemed excellent, but 
when contrasted with a greater rival, his faults at once appeared." 
His chief virtue seems to have been the purity of his Latin idiom. 
He neither copied Greek constructions nor affected archaisms, as 
Eutilius Scaurus, Cotta, and so many others in his own time, 
and Sallust, Lucretius, and Varro in a later age.^ The absence 
of any recognised standard of classical diction made it more difficult 
than at first appears for an orator to fix on the right medium 
between affectation and colloquialism. 

^ Hor. Od. i. 12. ^ Nobilis omatur lauro coUega secunda. — Jav. x. 

8 See Brut. xxxv. 132, sq. 



us HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

The era inaugurated by the Gracchi was in the highest degree 
favourable to eloquence. The disordered state of the Eepublic, in 
which party-spirit had banished patriotism and was itself surrender- 
ing to armed violence, called for a style of speaking commensurate 
with the turbulence of public Hfe. Never in the world's history 
lias fierce passion found such exponents in so great a sphere. 
It is not only the vehemence of their language — that may 
have been paralleled elsewhere — it is the reaUtij of it that im- 
presses us. The words that denounced an enemy were not idly 
ilung into the forum ; they fell among those who had the power 
and the will to act upon them. He who sent them forth must 
expect them to ruin either his antagonist or himseK. Each man 
chose his side, with the daggers of the other party before his face. 
His eloquence, like his sword, was a weapon for hfe and death. 
Only in the French Revolution have oratory and assassination thus 
gone hand in hand. Demosthenes could lash the Athenians into 
entlnisiasm so great that in delight at his eloquence they forgot 
his advice. "I want you," he said, "not to applaud me, but to 
march against Philip." ^ There was no danger of the Roman 
people forgetting action in applause. They rejoiced to hear the 
orator, but it was that he might impel them to tumultuous 
activity ; he was caterer not for the satisfaction of their ears, but 
for the employment of their hands. Thus he paid a heavy price 
for eminence. Few of Rome's greatest orators died in their beds. 
Carbo put an end to his own life ; the two Gracchi, Antonius, 
Drusus, Cicero himself, perished by the assassin's hand ; Crassus 
was delivered by sudden illness from the same fate. It is not 
wonderful if with the sword hanging over their heads, Roman 
orators attain to a vehemence beyond example in other nations. 
The charm that danger lends to daring is nowhere better shown 
than in the case of Cicero. Timid by nature, he not only in his 
speeches hazarded his life, but even when the dagger of Antony 
was waiting for him, he could not bring himself to flee. With 
the civil war, however, eloquence was for a time suppressed. 
Neither argument nor menace could make head against the 
furious brutality of Marius, or the colder butcheries of Sulla. 
Rut the intervening period produced two of the greatest speakers 
Rome ever saw, both of whom Cicero places at the very summit 
of their art, between whom he professes himself unable to decide, 
and about whom he gives the most authentic and copious account. 
These were the advocates M. Antonius (143-87 B.C.) and 
M. LiciNius Crassus (140-91 b.c.). 

Both of them spoke in the senate and assembly as well as in the 
^ See Dunlop, vol. ii. p. 274. 



THE LAW-COURTS. 1J9 

courts; and Crassus was perhaps a better political than forensic 
orator. IS'evertheless the criticism of Cicero, from which we gain 
oui' chief knowledge, is mainly directed to their forensic qualifica- 
tions ; and it is probable that at the period at which they flourished, 
the law-courts ofi"ered the fullest combination of advantages for 
bringing out all the merits of a speaker. For the comitia were 
moved solely by passion or interest ; the senate was swayed by 
party considerations, and was little touched by argument ; whereas 
the courts ofi'ered just enough necessity for exact reasoning without 
at all resisting appeals to popular passion. Of the two kinds of 
judicia at Eome, the civil cases were Httle sought after ; the public 
criminal trials being those which the great patroni delighted to 
undertake. A few words may not be out of place here on the 
general division of cases, and the jurisdiction of the magistrates, 
senate, and people, as it is necessary to understand these in order 
to appreciate the special kind of oratory they developed. [ 

There had been, previously to this period, two praetors m Eome, 
the Praetor Urhanus, who adjudged cases between citizens in 
accordance with civil law, and the Praetor Peregrinus^ who pre- 
sided whenever a foreigner or alien was concerned, and judged 
according to the principles of natural law. Afterwards six prae- 
tors were appointed; and in the time of Antonius they judged 
not only civil but criminal cases, except those concerning the 
life of a citizen or the weKare of the state, which the people 
reserved for themselves. It must be remembered that the supreme 
judicial power was vested in the sovereign people in their comitia ; 
that they delegated it in public matters to the senate, and in 
general legal cases to the praetor's court, but that in every capital 
charge a final appeal to them remained. The praetors at an early 
date handed over their authority to other judges, chosen either 
from the citizens at large, or from the body of Judices Scledi, who 
were renewed every year. These subsidiary judges might consist of 
a single o-rliter^ of small boards of three, seven, or ten, &c., or of a 
larger body called the Centum vin, chosen from the thirty-five tribes, 
who sat all the year, the others being only appointed for the special 
case. But over their decisions the praetor exercised a superior 
supervision, and he could annul them on appeal. The authorities 
on which the praetor based his practice were those of the Twelve 
Tables and the custom-law ; but he had besides this a kind of legis- 
lative prerogative of his own. For on coming into office he had to 
issue an edict, called edidum perpetuum,^ specifying the principles 
he intended to guide him in any new cases that might arise. If 
these were merely a continuation of those of his predecessor, his 

1 I. e. the continuous edict, as being issued afresh with every fresh praetor. 



120 ' HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATUEE. 

edict was called tralatidum, or "handed on." But more often 
they were of an independent character, the result of his knowledge 
or his prejudices ; and too often he departed widely from them in 
the course of his year of office. It was not until after the time of 
Crass as and Antonius that a law was passed enforcing consistency 
in this respect (67 B.C.). Thus it was inevitable that great loose- 
ness should prevail in the application of legal principles, from the 
great variety of supplementary codes (edicta), and the instability 
of case-law. Moreover, the praetor was seldom a veteran lawyer, 
but generally a man of moderate experience and ambitious views, 
who used the praetorship merely as a stepping-stone to the liigher 
offices of state. Hence it was by no means certain that he 
would be able to appreciate a complicated technical argument, and 
as a matter of fact the more popular advocates rarely troubled 
themselves to advance one. 

Praetors also generally presided over capital trials, of which the 
proper jurisdiction lay with the comitia. In Sulla's time their 
number was increased to ten, and each was chairman of the qiiaestio 
which sat on one of the ten chief crimes, extortion, peculation, 
bribery, treason, coining, forgery, assassination or poisoning, and 
violence.^ As assessors he had the quaesitor or chief juror, and a 
certain number of the Judices Seledi of whom some account has 
been already given. The prosecutor and defendant had the righ 
of objecting to any member of the list. If more than one accuser 
offered, it was decided which should act at a preliminary trial 
called Divinatio. Owing to the desire to win fame by accusations, 
this occurrence was not unfrequcnt. 

When the day of the trial arrived the prosecutor first spoke, 
explaining the case and bringing in the evidence. This consisted 
of the testimony of free citizens voluntarily given ; of slaves, wrung 
from them by torture ; and of ^vritten documents. The best advo- 
cates, as for instance Cicero in his Milo, were not disposed, any 
more than we should be, to attach much weight to evidence obtained 
by the rack ; but in estimating the other two sources they differed 
from us. We should give the preference to written documents ; 
the Eomans esteemed more highly the declarations of citizens. 
These offered a grander field for the display of ingenuity and mis- 
representation ; it is, therefore, in handling these that the celebrated 
advocates put forth all their skill. The examination of evidence 
over, the prosecutor put forth his case in a long and elaborate 
speech; and the accused was then allowed to defend himself. 
Eoth were, as a rule, limited in point of time, and sometimes to a 

1 De repetundis, de peculatu, de ambitu, de inaiestate, de nummis adul- 
terinis, de falsis testameatis, de sicariis, de vi. 



THE LAW-COUKIS. 121 

period whicli to us would seem quite inconsistent with justice to 
the case. Instead of the strict probity and perfect independence 
which we associate with the highest ministers of the law, the 
Eoman judices were often canvassed, bribed, or intimidated. So 
flagitious had the practice become, that Cicero mentions a whole 
bench having been induced by indulgences of the most abominable 
kind to acquit Clodius, though manifestly guilty. "VVe know also 
that Pompey and Antony resorted to the practice of packing the 
forum with hired troops and assassins ; and we learn from Cicero 
that it was the usual plan for provincial governors to extort enough 
not only to satisfy their own rapacity, but to buy their impunity 
from the judges.^ 

Under circumstances like these we cannot wonder if strict law 
was httle attended to, and the moral principles that underlay it 
still less. The chief object was to inflame the prejudices or anger 
of the jurors ; or, still more, to excite their compassion, to serve 
one's party, or to acquire favour with the leading citizen. For 
example, it was a rule that men of the same political views should 
appear on the same side. Cicero and Hortensius, though often 
opposed, still retained friendly f eehngs for each other ; but when 
Cicero went over to the senatorial party, the last bar to free inter* 
course with his rival was removed, since henceforward they were 
always retained together. 

With regard to moving the pity of the judges, many instances 
of its success are related both in Greece and Eome. The best are 
those of Galba and Piso, both notorious culprits, but both acquitted ; 
the one for bringing forward his young children, the other for 
prostrating himself in a shower of rain to kiss the judges' feet and 
rising up with a countenance bedaubed with mud ! Facts like 
these, and they are innumerable, compel us to believe that the 
reverence for justice as a sacred thing, so inbred in Christian civi- 
lization, was foreign to the people of Eome. It is a gloom.y 
spectacle to see a mighty nation deliberately giving the rein to 
passion and excitement heedless of the miscarriage of justice. The 
celebrated law, re-enacted by Gracchus, " That no citizen should be 
condemned to death without the consent of the people," banished 
justice from the sphere of reason to that of emotion or caprice. As 
progress widens emotion necessarily contracts its sphere ; the pure 
light of reason raises her beacon on high. When Antonius, the 
most successful of advocates, declared that his success was clue not 
to legal knowledge, of which he was destitute, but to his making 
the judges pleased, first with themselves and then with himself, we 
may appreciate his honesty ; but we gladly acknowledge a state of 
1 Verr. i. 14. 



122 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

things as past and g(jne in "whicli lie could -wind up an accusation^ 
with these words, " If it ever was excusable for the Eoman people 
to give the reins to theii' just excitement, as without doubt it often 
has been, there has no case existed in which it was more excusable 
than now." 

Cicero regards the advent of these two men, M. Antonius and 
Crassus, as analogous to that of Demosthenes and Hyperides at 
Athens. They first raised Latin eloquence to a height that 
rivalled that of Greece. But though their merits were so evenly 
balanced that it was impossible to decide between them, their 
excellencies were by no means the same. It is evident that 
Cicero preferred Crassus, for he assigns him the chief place in his 
dialogue de Oratore, and makes him the vehicle of his own views. 
Moreover, he was a man of much more varied knowledge than 
Antonius. An opinion prevailed in Cicero's day that neither of 
them was familiar with Greek literature. This, however, was a 
mistake. Both were well read in it. But Antonius desired to be 
thought ignorant of it ; hence he never brought it forward in his 
speeches. Crassus did not disdain the reputation of a proficient, 
but he wished to be regarded as despising it. These relics of old 
Eoman narrowness, assumed whether from conviction or, more 
probably, to please the people, are remarkable at an epoch so 
comparatively cidtured. They show, if proof were wanted, how 
completely the appearance of Cicero marks a new period in litera- 
ture, for he is as anxious to popularise his knowledge of Greek 
letters as his predecessors had been to liide theu^s. The advan- 
tages of Antony were chiefly native and personal ; those of 
Crassus acquired and artificial. Antony had a ready wit, an 
impetuous flow of words, not always the best, but good enough 
for the purpose, a presence of mind and f ertilit;y' of invention that 
nothing could quench, a noble person, a wonderful memory, and 
a sonorous voice the very defects of which he turned to his 
advantage; he never refused a case; he seized the bearings of 
each with facility, and espoused it with zeal ; he knew from long 
practice all the arts of persuasion, and was an adept in the use of 
them ; in a word, he was thoroughly and genuinely popular. 

Crassus was grave and dignified, excellent in interpretation, 
definition, and equitable construction, so learned in law as to be 
called the best lawyer among the orators ; ^ and yet with all this 
grace and erudition, he joined a sparkling humour which was 
always lively, never commonplace, and whose brilliant saUies no 

1 That against Caepio, De Or. li. 48, 199. 

2 Eloqucrdhan iuris^entissimus : Scaevola was iurisperitorum eloquentissi- 
mus. — Brut. 145. 



ANTONIUS AND CEASSUS. 123 

misfortune could clieck. His first speecli was an accusation of 
the renegade democrat Carbo ; his last, which was also his best, 
was an assertion of the privileges of his order against the over- 
bearing insolence of the consul Philippus. The consul, stung to 
fury by the sarcasm of the speaker, bade his hctor seize his pledges 
as a senator. This insult roused Crassus to a supreme effort. 
His words are preserved by Cicero^ — " an tu, quum onmem auctori- 
tatem universi ordinis pro pignore putaris, eamque in conspectu 
popuK Eomani concideris, me his existimas pignoribus posee 
terreri? ISTon tibi ilia sunt caedenda, si Crassum vis coercere; 
haec tibi est incidenda hngua ; qua vel evulsa, spiritu ipso Hbidi- 
nem tuam hbertas mea refutabit." This noble retort, spoken 
amid bodily pain and weakness, brought on a fever which within 
a week brought him to the grave (91 B.C.), as Cicero says, by no 
means prematurely, for he was thus preserved from the horrors 
that followed. Antonius hved for some years longer. It was 
under the tyrannical rule of Marius and Cinna that he met his 
end. Having found, through the indiscretion of a slave, that he 
was in hiding, they sent hired assassins to murder him. The 
men entered the chamber where the great orator lay, and prepared 
to do their bloody work, but he addressed them in terms of such 
pathetic eloquence that they turned back, melted with pity, and 
declared they could not kill Antonius. Their leader then came in, 
and, less accessible to emotion than his men, cut off Antonius' 
head and. carried it to Marius. It was nailed to the rostra, 
"exposed," says Cicero, "to the gaze of those citizens whose 
interests he had so often defended." 

After the death of these two great leaders, there appear two 
inferior men who faintly reflect their special excellences. These are 
C. AuRELics CoTTA (cousul 75 B.C.) an imitator of Antonius, though 
without any of his fire, and P. Sulpicius Eufus (fl. 121-88 B.C.) 
a bold and vigorous speaker, who tried, without success, to repro- 
duce the high-bred wit of Crassus. He was, according to Cicero,^ 
the most tragic of orators. His personal gifts were remarkable, 
his presence commanding, his voice rich and varied. His fault 
was want of apphcation. The ease with which he spoke made 
him dishke the labour of preparation, and shun altogether that of 
written composition. Cotta was exactly the oposite of Sulpicius. 
His weak health, a rare thing among the Romans of his day, 
compelled him to practise a soft sedate method of speech, per- 
suasive rather than commanding. In this he was excellent, but 
that his popularity was due chiefly to want of competitors is 
shown by the suddenness of his eclipse on the first appearance of 
1 De Or. iii. 1, 4 2 gj-ut. 1^, 



124 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

Hortensius. The gentle courteous character of Cotta is well brought 
out in Cicero's dialogue on oratory, where his remarks are con 
trasted with the mature but distinct views of Crassus and 
Antonius, with the conservative grace of Catulus, and the mascu- 
line but less dignified elegance of Caesar. 

Another speaker of this epoch is Carbo, son of the Carbo already 
mentioned, an adherent of the senatorial party, and opponent of 
the celebrated Livius Drusus. On the death of Drusus he de- 
livered an oration in the assembly, the concluding words of which 
are preserved by Cicero, as an instance of the effectiveness of the 
trochaic rhythm. They were received with a storm of applause, 
as indeed their elevation justly merits.^ " Marce Druse, jpatrern, 
appello ; tu dicere solehas sacram esse rempuhlicam : quicunque 
earn violavissent, ah omnibus esse ei poenas persolutas. Patris 
dictum sapiens temeritas filii comprohavit" In this grand sentence 
sounds the very voice of Eome ; the stern patriotism, the rever- 
ence for the words of a father, the communion of the living with 
their dead ancestors. We cannot wonder at the fondness with 
which Cicero Hngers over these ancient orators; while fully 
acknowledging his own superiority, how he dravt^s out their 
beauties, each from its crude environment ; how he shows them 
to be deficient indeed in cultivation and learning, but to ring trae 
to the old tradition of the state, and for that very reason to speak 
with a power, a persuasiveness, and a charm, which all the rules 
of polished art could never hope to attain. 

In the concluding passage of the De Oratore Catulus says he 
wishes Hortensius (114-50 b.c.) could have taken part in 
the debate, as he gave promise of excelling in all the quali- 
fications that had been specified. Crassus replies — "He not 
only gives promise of being, but is already one of the first of 
orators. I thought so when I heard him defend the cause of the 
Africans during the year of my consulship, and I thought so stiU 
more strongly when, but a short while ago, he spoke on behalf of 
the king of Bithynia." This is supposed to have been said in 
91 B.C., the year of Crassus's death, four years after the first 
appearance of Hortensius. This brilliant orator, who at the age of 
nineteen spoke before Crassus and Scaevola and gained their unquali- 
fied approval, and who, after the death of Antonius, rose at once 
into the position of leader of the Eonian bar, was as remarkable 
for his natural as for liis acquired endowments. Eight years 
senior to Cicero, "prince of the courts "^ when Cicero began 
public life, for some time his rival and antagonist, but afterwards 
his illustrious though admittedly inferior coadjutor, and towards the 
1 Orator. Ixiii. 213. ^ Judiciorum rex. Divin. in Ae. Caecil. 7. 



HORTENSIUS. 125 

close of both of their lives, his intimate and valued friend ; Her- 
tensius is one of the few men in whom success did not banish 
enjoyment, and displacement by a rival did not turn to bitterness. 
Without presenting the highest virtue, his career of forty-four year? 
is nevertheless a pleasant and instructive one. It showed consist- 
ency, independence, and honour; he never changed sides, he 
never flattered the great, he never acquired wealth unjustly. In 
these points he may be contrasted with Cicero. But on the other 
hand, he was inactive, luxurious, and efi'eminate ; not like Cicero, 
fighting to the last, but retiring from pubhc life as soon as he saw 
the domination of Pompey or Caesar to be inevitable ; not even 
in his professional labours showing a strong ambition, but yielding 
with epicurean indolence the palm of superiority to his young 
rival ; still less in his home hf e and leisure moments pursuing 
Hke Cicero his seK-culture to develop his own nature and enrich 
the minds and literature of his countrymen, but regaling himself 
at luxurious banquets in sumptuous villas, decked with everything 
that could delight the eye or charm the fancy ; preserving herds 
of deer, wild swine, game of all sorts for field and feast ; stocking 
vast lakes with rare and delicate fish, to which this brilliant 
epicure was so attached that on the death of a favourite lamprey 
he shed tears; buying the costhest of pictures, statues, and 
embossed works; and furnishing a cellar which yielded to his 
unworthy heir 10,000 casks of choice Chian wine. "When we 
read the pursuits in which Hortensius spent his time, we cannot 
wonder that he was soon overshadowed ; the stuff of the Eoman 
was lacking in him, and great as were his talents, even they, as 
Cicero justly remarks, were not calculated to insure a mature or 
lasting fame. They lay in the lower sphere of genius rather than 
the higher ; in a bright expression, a deportment graceful to such 
a point that the greatest actors studied from him as he spoke ; in 
a voice clear, meUow, and persuasive ; in a memory so prodigious 
that once after being present at an auction and challenged to 
repeat the hst of sale, he recited the entire catalogue without 
hesitation, like the sailor the points of his compass, backwards. 
As a consequence he was never at a loss. Everything sug- 
gested itself at the right moment, giving him no anxiety that 
might spoil the ease of his manner and his matchless confidence ; 
and if to all this we add a copiousness of expression and rich 
splendour of language exceeding all that had ever been heard in 
Eome, the encomiums so freely lavished on him by Cicero both in 
speeches and treatises, hardly seem exaggerated. 

There are few things pleasanter in the history of literature than 
the friendship of these two great men, untinctured, at least on 



126 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

Hortensius's part, by any drop of jealousy; and on Cicero's, though 
now and then overcast by unworthy suspicions, yet asserted after- 
wards with a warm generosity and manly confession of his weak- 
ness which left nothing to be desired. Though there were but 
eight years between them, Hortensius must be held to belong to 
the older period, since Cicero's advent constitutes an era. 

The chief events in the life of Hortensius are as follows. He 
served two campaigns in the Social War (91 B.C.), but soon aftei 
gave up military life, and took no part in the civil struggles that 
followed. His ascendancy in the courts dates from 83 B.C. and 
continued till 70 B.C. when Cicero dethroned him by the prosecu- 
tion of Verres. Hortensius was consul the following year, and 
afterwards we find him appearing as advocate on the senatorial 
side against the self-styled champions of the people, whose cause 
at that time Cicero espoused {e.g. in the Gabinian and Mani- 
lian laws). When Cicero, after his consulship (63 B.C.), went over 
to the aristocratic party, he and Hortensius appeared regularly on 
the same side, Hortensius conceding to him the privilege of 
speaking last, thus confessing liis own inferiority. The party 
character of great criminal trials has already been alluded to, and 
is an important element in the consideration of them. A master" 
of eloquence speaking for a senatorial defendant before a jury of 
equites, might hope, but hardly expect, an acquittal ; and a sena- 
torial orator, pleading before jurymen of his own order needed not 
to exercise the highest art in order to secure a favourable hearing. 
It has been suggested ^ that his fame is in part due to the circum- 
stance, fortunate for him, that he had to address the courts as 
reorganised by Sulla. The coahtion of Pompey, Caesar, and 
Crassus (60 B.C.), sometimes called the^rsj^ Triumvirate, showed 
plainly that the state was near collapse; and Hortensius, despairing 
of its restitution, retired from public life, confining himself to the 
duties of an advocate, and more and more addicting himself to 
refined pleasures. The only blot on his character is his unscrupu- 
lousness in dealing with the judges. Cicero accuses him^ of 
bribing them on one occasion, and the fact that he was not 
contradicted, though his rival was present, makes the accusation 
more than probable. The fame of Hortensius waned not only 
through Cicero's superior lustre, but also because of his own lack 
of sustained efi'ort. The peculiar style of his oratory is from this 
point of view so ably criticised by Cicero that, having no remains 
of Hortensius to judge by, we translate some of his remarks. ^ 

^ Diet. Biog. s. V. Hortensius. Forsytli's Hortensius, and an article on him 
by M. Charpentier in his '* Writers of the Empire," should be consulted. 
* * Div. in Q. Caecil. ^ Brut. xcv. 



HORTENSIUS. 127 

" If we inquire wliy Hortensius obtained more celebrity in Ms 
youth than in his mature age, we shall find there are two good 
reasons. First because his style of oratory was the Asiatic, which 
is more becoming to youth than to age. Of this style there are two 
divisions ; the one sententious and witty, the sentiments neatly 
turned and graceful rather than grave or sedate : an example of 
this in history is Timaeus ; in oratory during my own boyhood 
there was Hierocles of Alabanda, and still more his brother 
Menecles, both whose speeches are, considering their style, 
worthy of the highest praise. The other division does not aim at 
a frequent use of pithy sentiment, but at rapidity and rush of 
expression; this now prevails throughout Asia, and is charac- 
terised not only by a stream of eloquence but by a graceful and 
ornate vocabulary : Aeschylus of Cnidos, and my own contem- 
porary Aeschines the IMilesian, are examples of it. They possess a 
fine flow of speech, but they lack precision and grace of senti- 
ment. Both these classes of oratory suit foxing men well, but in 
older persons they show a want of dignity. Hence Hortensius, 
who excelled in both, obtained as a young man the most tumul- 
tuous applause. For he possessed that strong leaning for pohshed 
and condensed maxims which Menecles displayed ; as with whom, 
so with Hortensius, some of these maxims were more remarkable 
for sweetness and grace than for aptness and indispensable use ; 
and so his speech, though highly strung and impassioned without 
losing finish or smoothness, was nevertheless not approved by the 
older critics. I have seen Philippus hide a smile, or at other 
times look angry or annoyed ; but the youths were lost in admira- 
tion, and the multitude was deeply moved. At that time he was 
in popular estimation almost perfect, and held the first place 
■without dispute. For though his oratory lacked authority, it was 
thought suitable to his age ; but when his position as a consular 
and a senator demanded a weightier style, he still adhered to the 
same; and having given up his former unremitting study and 
practice, retained only the neat concise sentiments, but lost the 
rich adornment with which in old times he had been wont to clothe 
his thoughts." . 

The Asiatic style to which Cicero here alludes, was affected, as 
its name imphes, by the rhetoricians of Asia Minor, and is gene- 
rally distinguished from the Attic by its greater profusion of 
verbal ornament, its more Hberal use of tropes, antithesis, figures, 
&c. and, generally, by its inanity of thought. Ehodes, which had 
been so well able to appreciate the eloquence of Aeschines and 
Demosthenes, first opened a crusade against this false taste, and 
Cicero (who himself studied at Ehodes as weU as Athens) brought 



128 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

about a similar return to purer models at Rome. The Asiatic 
style represents a permanent type of oratorical effort, tlie desire to 
use word-painting instead of life-painting, turgidity instead of 
vigour, allusiveness instead of directness, point instead of wit, 
frigid inflation instead of real passion. It borrows poetical effects, 
and heightens the colour without deepening the shade. In 
Greece Aeschines shows some traces of an Asiatic tendency as 
contrasted with the soberer self-restraint of Demosthenes. In Rome 
Hortensius, as contrasted with Cicero, and even Cicero himself, 
according to some critics, as contrasted with Brutus and Calvus, — ■ 
though this charge is hardly well-founded, — in France Bossuet, in 
England Burke, have leaned towards the same fault. 

We have now traced the history of Roman Oratory to the time 
of Cicero, and we have seen that it produces names of real 
eminence, not merely in the history of Rome, but in that of 
humanity. The loss to us of the speeches of such orators as Cato, 
Gracchus, Antonius, and Crassus is incalculable; did we possess 
them we should be able form a truer estimate of Roman genius than 
if we possessed the entire works of Ennius, Pacuvius, or Attius. Eor 
the great men who wielded this tremendous weapon were all 
burgesses of Rome, they had all the good and all the bad qualities 
which that name suggests, many of them in an extraordinary 
degree. They are all the precursors, models, or rivals of Cicero, 
the greatest of Roman orators ; and in them the true structure of 
the language as well as the mind of Rome would have been fully, 
though unconsciously, revealed. If the literature of a country be 
taken as the expression in the field of thought of the national 
character as pourtrayed in action, this group of orators would 
be considered the most genuine representative of Roman literature. 
The permanent contributions to human thought would indeed 
have been few : neither in eloquence nor in any other domain did 
Rome prove herseK creative, but in eloquence she at least showed 
herself beyond expression masculine and vigorous. The supreme 
interest of her history, the massive characters of the men that 
wrought it, would here have shown themselves in the working ; 
men whose natures are a riddle to us, would have stood out, judged 
by their own testimony, clear as statues ; and we should not have 
had so often to pin our faith on the biassed views of party, or the 
uncritical panegyrics of school-bred professors or courtly rhetori- 
cians. The next period shows us the culmination, the short 
bloom, and the sudden fall of national eloquence, Avhen with the 
death of Cicero the "Latin tongue was silent," ^ and as he himself 
says, clamatores not oratores were left to succeed him. 

\ "Deilendus Cicero est, I>atiae.c[ue sUentia linguae." — Sen Sum. 



CHAPTER XT. 

Other kinds of Prose Literature, Grammar, Phetorio, 
AND Philosophy (147-63 b.c.). 

Great literary activity of aU kinds was, after the third Punic 
war, liable to continual interruption from political struggles or 
revolutions. But between each two periods of disturbance there 
was generally an interval in which philosophy, law, and rhetoric 
were carefully studied. As, however, no work of this period has 
come down to us except the treatise to Herennius, our notice of it 
will be proportionately general and brief. We shall touch on the 
principal studies in order. Pirst in time as in importance conies 
Law, the earliest great representative of which is P. Mucins Scae- 
voLA, consul in 133 e.g. but better known as Pontifex Maximus. 
In this latter office, which he held for several years, Mucins did 
good service to literature. He united a high technical training 
with a liberal mind, and superintended the publication of the 
Annales Pontifieum from the earliest period to his own date. This 
was a great boon to historians. He gave another to jurists. His 
responsa were celebrated for their insight into the principles of 
Law, and for the minute knowledge they displayed. He was 
conscientious enough to study the law of every case before he 
undertook to plead it, a practice vfhich, however commendable, 
was rare even with advocates of the highest fame, as, for example, 
M. Antonius. 

The jurisconsult of this period used to offer his services without 
payment to any who chose to consult him. At first he appeared 
in the forum, but as his fame and the number of applicants 
increased, he remained at home and received all day. His replies 
were always oral, but when written down were considered as 
authoritative, and often quoted by the orators. In return for this 
laborious occupation, he expected the support of his clients in his 
candidature for the offices of state. An anecdote is preserved of C. 
Pigulus, a jurisconsult, who, not having been successful for the 
consulship, addressed his conmltores thus, "You know how to 

I 



130 HISTOEY OF ROMAN LITEEATURE. 

consult me, but not (it seems) how to make me consul"^ In 
addition to the parties in a suit, advocates in other causes often 
came to a great jurisconsult to be coached in the law of their case. 
For instance, Antonius, who, though a ready speaker, had no 
knowledge of jurisprudence, often went to Scaevola for this pur- 
pose. Moreover there were always one or two regular pupils who 
accompanied the jurisconsult, attended carefully to his words, and 
committed them assiduously to memory or writing. Cicero himself 
did this for the younger Scaevola, and thus laid the foundation of 
that clear grasp on the civil law which was so great a help to him 
in his more difficult speeches. It was not necessary that the pupil 
should himself intend to become a consultus; it was enough that he 
desired to acquire the knowledge for public purposes, although, of 
course, it required great interest to procure for a young man so 
high a privilege. Cicero was introduced to Scaevola by the orator 
Crassus. The family of the Much, as noticed by Cicero, wer& 
traditionally distinguished by their legal knowledge, as that of the 
Appii Claudii were by eloquence. The Augur Q. Mucins Scaevola 
who comes midway between Publius and his son Quintus was 
somewhat less celebrated than either, but he was nevertheless a man 
of eminence. He died probably in 87 B.C., and Cicero mentions 
that it was in consequence of this event that he himself became a 
pupil of his nephew. 2 

The great importance of Religious Law must not be forgotten in 
estimating the acquirements of these men. Though to us the Jus 
Augurale and Jus Pontificium are of small interest compared with 
the Jus Civile ; yet to the Romans of 120 b.c., and especially to 
an old and strictly aristocratic family, they had all the attraction 
of exclusiveness and immemorial authority. In all countries 
religious law exercises at first a sway far in excess of its proper 
province, and Rome was no exception to the rule. The publication 
of civil law is an era in civilization. Just as the chancellorship 
and primacy of England were often in the hands of one person 
and fliat an ecclesiastic, so in Rome the pontifices had at first the 
making of almost all law. What a canonist was to Mediaeval 
Europe, a pontifex was to senatorial Rome. In the time of which 
we are now speaking (133-63 B.C.), the secular law had fully 
asserted its supremacy on its own ground, and it was the dignity 
and influence, not the power of the post, that made the pontificate 
so great an object of ambition, and so inaccessible to upstart 
candidates. Even for Cicero to obtain a seat in the college of 

1 An vos consulere scitis, consulem facere nescitis ? See Teuffel, R. L. 
§ 130, 6. 

2 Lael. i. His character generally is given, Brut. xxvL 102. 



Q. MUCIUS SCAEVOLA. 131 

augurs was no easy task, althougli lie tad already won his way to 
the consulship and been hailed as the saviour of his country. 

The younger Scaevola (Q. Mucius Scaevola), who had been his 
father's pupil/ and was the most eloquent of the three, was born 
about 135 B.C., was consul 95 with Licinius Crassus for his colleague, 
and afterwards Pontifex Maximus. He was an accomplished 
Greek scholar, a man of commanding eloquence, deeply versed in 
the Stoic philosophy, and of the highest nobility of character. As 
Long well says, " He is one of those illustrious men whose fame is 
not preserved by his writings, but in the more enduring monument 
of the memory of all nations to whom the language of Eome is 
known." His chief work, which was long extant, and is highly 
praised by Cicero, was a digest of the civil law. Eudorff says of 
it,2 " For the first time we meet here with a comprehensive, uniform, 
and methodical system, in the place of the old interpretation of 
laws and casuistry, of legal opinions and prejudices." Immediately 
on its publication it acquired great authority, and was commented 
upon within a few years of the death of its author. It is quoted in 
the Digest, and is the earhest work to which reference is there made.^ 
He was especially clear in definitions and distinctions,* and the 
grace with which he invested a dry subject made him deservedly 
popular. Though so profound a laAvyer, he was quite free from 
the offensive stamp of the mere professional man. His urbanity, 
unstained integrity, and high position, fitted him to exercise a 
widespread influence. He had among his hearers Cicero, as we 
have already seen, and among jurists proper, Aquillius Gallus, 
Balbus Lucilius, and others, who all attained to eminence. His 
virtue was such that his name became proverbial for probity as for 
legal eminence. In Horace he is coupled with Gracchus as the 
ideal of a lawyer, as the other of an orator. 

** Gracchus ut hie illi foret, huic ut Mucius ille."* 

The great oratorical activity of this age produced a corresponding 
interest in the theory of eloquence. We have seen that many of 
the orators received lessons from Greek rhetoricians. We have 
seen also the deep attraction which rhetoric possessed over the 
Eoman mind. It was, so to speak, the form of thought in which 
their intellectual creations were almost all cast. Such a maxim as 
that attributed to Scaevola, Fiat iustitia : mat caelum, is not legal 
but rhetorical. The plays of Attius owed much of their success 
to the ability with which statement was pitted against counter- 

1 Q. Mucius Scaevola, Pontifex, sen of Publius, nephew of Q. Mucius 
Scaevola, Augur. 

2 Quoted by Teuffel, § 141, 2. 3 Diet. Biog. 

* See De Or. i. 53, 229 » Ep. ii. 2, 89. 



132 HISTOEY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

statement, plea against plea. The philosopliic works of Cicero ar« 
coloured with rhetoric. Cases are advanced, refuted, or summed 
up, with a view to presentability {veri simile)^ not abstract truth. 
The history of Livy, the epic of Virgil, are eminently rhetorical, 
A Roman when not fighting was pleading. It was, then, important 
that he should be well grounded in the art. Greek rhetoricians, 
in spite of Cato's opposition, had been steadily making way, and 
increasing the number of their pupils; but it was not until about 
93 B.C. that Plotius Gallus taught the principles of Ehetoric in 
Latin. Quintilian says,^ " Latinos dicendi praeceptores extremis 
L. Crassi temporibus coepisse Cicero auctor est: quorum insignis 
maxime Plotius fuit" He was the first of that long list of writers 
who expended wit, learning, and industry, in giving precepts of a 
mechanical character to produce what is unproduceable, namely, a 
successful style of speaking. Their treatises are interesting, for 
they show on the one hand the severe technical application which 
the Eomans were always willing to bestow in order to imitate the 
Greeks; and on the other, the complex demands of Latin rhetoric 
as contrasted with the simpler and more natural style of modern 
times. 

The most important work on the subject is the treatise dedicated 
to Herennius (80 B.C.), written probably in the time of Sulla, and 
for a long time reckoned among Cicero's works. The reason for 
this confusion is twofold. First, the anonymous character of the 
work; and, secondly, the frequent imitations of it by Cicero in his 
De Inventionej an incomplete essay written when he was a young 
man. Who the author was is not agreed; the balance of proba- 
bility is in favour of Cornifioius. Kayser^ points out several coin- 
cidences between Cornificius's views, as quoted by Quintilian, and 
the rhetorical treatise to Herennius. Tne author, whoever he may 
be, was an accomplished man, and, while a warm admirer of Greek 
eloquence, by no means disposed to concede the inferiority of his 
own countrymen. His criticism upon the inanitas^ of the Greek 
manuals is thoroughly just. They were simply guides to an 
elegant accomplishment, and had no bearing on real life. It was 
quite different with the Roman manuals. These were intended 
to fit the reader for forensic contests, and, we cannot doubt, did 
materially help towards this result. It was only in the imperial 
epoch that empty ingenuity took the place of activity, and rhetoric 
sunk to the level of that of Greece. There is nothing calling for 
special remark in the contents of the book, though all is good. 

1 ii. 4, 42. 2 See Teuffel, Rom. Lit. 149, § 4. 

* Compare Lucr. i. 633. Magis inter inanes quamde gravis inter Graios 
qui vera requirunt. 



GEAMMATICAL SCIENCE. 133 

The cMef points of interest in this suhject will be discussed in a 
later chapter. The style is pure and copious, the Latin that 
finished idiom which is the finest vehicle for Eoman thought, that 
spoken by the highest circles at the best period of the language. 

The science of Grammar was now exciting much attention. The 
Stoic writers had formulated its main principles, and had assigned 
it a place in their system of general philosophy. It remained for 
the Eoman students to apply the Greek treatment to their own 
language. Apparently, the earliest labours were of a desultory 
kind. The poet Lucilius treated many points of orthography, 
pronunciation, and the like; and he criticised iuaccuracies of 
syntax or metre in the poets who had gone before him. A little 
later we find the same mine further worked. Quintilian observes 
that grammar began at Rome by the exegesis of classical authors. 
Octavius Lampadio led the van with a critical commentary on the 
Punica of Naevius, and Q. Vargunteius soon after performed the 
same office for the annals of Ennius. The first scientific gram- 
marian was Aelius Stilo, a Roman knight (144-70 b.c.). His 
name was L. Aelius Praeconinus; he received the additional 
cognomen Stilo from the facility with which he used his pen, 
especially in writing speeches for others to deliver. At the same 
time he was no orator, and Cicero implies that better men often 
used his compositions through mere laziness, and allowed them to 
pass as their own.^ Cicero mentions in more than one place that 
he himself had been an admiring pupil of Aelius. And Lucihus 
addressed some of his satires to him, probably those on grammar, 

*' Has res ad te scr'ptas Luci misimus Aeli ;" 

so that he is a bond of connection between the two epochs. His 
learning was profound and varied. He dedicated his investigations 
to Yarro, who speaks warmly of him, but mentions that his ety- 
mologies are often incorrect. He appears to have bestowed special 
care on Plautus, in which department he Wiis followed by Yarro, 
some of the results of whose criticism have been aheady given. 

The impulse given by Stilo was rapidly extended. Grammar 
became a favourite study with the Romans, as indeed it was one 
for which they were eminently fitted. The perfection to which 
they carried the analysis of sentences and the practical rules for 
correct speech as well as the systematization of the accidence, has 
made their grammars a model for all modern school-works. It is 
only recently that a deeper scientific knowledge has reorganised 
the entire treatment, and substituted for superficial analogy the 
true basis of a common structure, not only between Greek and 
1 Brut. Ivi. 207. 



134 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

Latin, but among all tlie languages of the Indo -European class. 
Nevertheless, the Eoman grammarians deserve great praise for theii' 
elaborate results in the sphere of correct writing. No defects of 
s^oitax perplex the reader of the classical authors. Imperfect and 
unphable the language is, but never inexact. And though the 
meaning is often hard to settle, this is owing rather to the 
inadequacy of the material than the carelessness of the writer. 

Side by side with rhetoric and grammar, Philosophy made its 
appearance at Eome. There was no importation from Greece to 
which a more determined resistance was made from the first by the 
national party. In the consulship of Strabo and Messala (162 B.C.) 
a decree was passed banishing philosophers and rhetoricians from 
Eome. Seven years later took place the embassy of the three 
leaders of the most celebrated schools of thought, Diogenes the Stoic, 
Critolaus the Peripatetic,, and Carneades the New Academician. 
The subtilty and eloquence of these disputants rekindled the 
interest in philosophy which had been smothered, not quenched, 
by the vigorous measures of the senate. There were two reasons 
why an interest in these studies was dreaded. First, they tended 
to spread disbelief in the state religion, by which the ascendency 
of the oligarchy was in great measure maintained ; secondly, they 
distracted men's minds, and diverted them from that exclusive 
devotion to pubhc life which the old regime demanded. Never- 
theless, some of the greatest nobles ardently espoused the cause 
of free thought. After the war with Perseus, and the detention 
of the Achaean hostages in Eome, many learned Greeks well versed 
in philosophical inquiries were brought into contact with their con- 
querors in a manner well calculated to promote mutual confidence. 
The most eminent of these was Polybius, who lived for years on 
terms of intimacy with Scipio and Laelius, and imparted to them 
his own wide views and varied knowledge. Prom them may be 
dated the real study of Philosophy at Eome. They both attained 
the highest renown in their lifetime and after their death for their 
philosophical eminence,^ but apparently they left no philosophical 
writings. The spirit, however, in which they approached philos- 
ophy is eminently characteristic of their nation, and determined 
the lines in which philosophic activity afterwards moved. 

In no department of thought is the difference between the Greek 
and Eoman mind more clearly seen ; in none was the form more 
completely borrowed, and the spirit more completely missed. The 
object of Greek philosophy had been the attainment of absolute 
truth. The long line of thinkers from Thales to Aristotle had 

1 De Or. it. 37 



PHILOSOPHY. 135 

approaclied philosophy in the belief that they could hy it be 
enabled to understand the cause of all that is. This lofty antici- 
pation pervades all their theories, and by its fruitfid influence 
engenders that wondrous grasp and fertility of thought ^ which 
gives their speculations an undying value. It is true that in the 
later systems this consciousness is less strongly present. It 
struggles to maintain itseK in stoicism and epicureanism against 
the rising claims of human happiness to be considered as the goal 
of philosophy. In the New Academy (which in the third century 
before Christ was converted to scepticism) and in the sceptical 
school, we see the first confession of incapacity to discover truth. 
Instead of certainties they offer probabilities sufficient to guide us 
through life ; the only axiom which they assert as incontrovertible 
being the fact that we know nothing. Thus instead of proposing 
as the highest activity of man a life of speculative thought, they 
came to consider inactivity and impassibility ^ the chief attainable 
good. Their method of proof was a dialectic which strove to show 
the inconsistency or uncertainty of their opponent's positions, but 
which did not and could not arrive at any constructive result. 
Philosophy (to use an ancient phrase) had fallen from the sphere 
of knowledge to that of opinion.^ 

Of these opinions there were three which from their definiteness 
were well calculated to lay hold on the Eoman mind. The first 
was that of the Stoics, that virtue is the only good ; the second 
that of the Epicureans, that pleasure is the end of man ; the third 
that of the Academy, that nothing can be known.* These were by 
no means the only, far less the exclusive characteristics of each 
school ; for in many ways they all strongly resembled each other, 
particularly stoicism and the New Academy ; and in their definition 
of what should be the practical result of their principles all were 
substantially agreed.-'' 

But what to the Greeks was a speculative principle to be drawn 
out by argument to its logical conclusions, to the Eomans was a 
practical maxim to be realized in life. The Romans did not under- 
stand the love of abstract truth, or the charm of abstract reasoning 
employed for its own sake without any ulterior end. To profess 
the doctrines of stoicism, and live a life of seK-indulgence, was to 

^ '' iyepriKO, voi]<Te(t>s." — Plat. Rep. Bk. iv. ^ airdOeia, arapa^ia. 

^ iTTia-TTjixTj and S6^a, s often oiiposed in Plato and Aristotle. 

* Sext. Kmp, Pyrrh. Hyp. i. 234. {'ApKealXaos) /tara fxly rh Trpix^ipov 
-irvppu>ueios ((paivero elvai iiaTO. 8e tt]v a\rf0eiav Soy/xariKhs ^u. So Bacon : 
Academia nova Acatalepsiam dogi«atizavit. 

° That is, all practically considered indifference or insensibility to be the 
thing best worth strivin;^ after. 



136 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

"be false to one's convictions ; to embrace Epicurus's system with- 
out making it subservient to enjoyment, was equally foreign to 
a consistent character. In Athens the daily Hfe of an Epicurean 
and a Stoic would not present any marked difference ; in discussion 
they would be widely divergent, but the contrast ended there. In 
Eome, on the contrary, it was the mode of life which made the chief 
distinction. Men who laboured for the state as jurists or senators, 
who were grave and studious, generally, if not always, adopted 
the tenets of Zeno; if they were orators, they naturally turned 
rather to the Academy, which offered that balancing of opinions 
so congenial to the tone of mind of an advocate. Among public men 
of the highest character, very few espoused Epicurus's doctrines. 

The mere assertion that pleasure was the sumrnum honmn for 
man was so repugnant to the old Eoman views that it could 
hardly have been made the basis of a self-sacrificing political 
activity. Accordingly we find in the period before Cicero only 
men of the second rank representing epicurean views. Amafinius 
is stated to have been the first who popularised them.^ He wrote 
some years before Cicero, and from his lucid and simple treatment 
immediately obtained a wide circulation for his books. The multi- 
tude (says Cicero), hurried to adopt his precepts, ^ finding them 
easy to understand, and in harmony with their own inclinations. 
The second writer of mark seems to have been Rabirius. He also 
wrote on the physical theory of Epicurus in a superficial way. He 
neither divided his subject methodically, nor attempted exact 
definitions, and all his arguments were drawn from the world of 
visible things. In fact, his system seems to have been a crude 
and ordinary materialism, such as the vulgar are in all ages prone 
to, and beyond which their minds cannot go. The refined 
Catulus was also an adherent of epicureanism, though he also 
attached himseK to the Academy. Among Greeks resident at 
Eome the best known teachers were Phaedrus and Zeno ; a book 
by the former on the gods was largely used by C-icero in the fijst 
book of his De Natura Deorum. A little later Philodemus of 
Gadara, parts of whose writings are still extant, seems to have 
risen to the first place. In the time of Cicero this system obtained 
more disciples among the foremost men. Both statesmen and 
poets cultivated it, and gained it a legitimate place among the 
genuine philosophical creeds.^ 

1 Cic. Tusc. iv. 3. 

^ Contrast the indifference of the vulgar for the tougher parts of the 
system. Lucr. " Haeu ratio Durior esse videtur . . . retroq^ue volgus abhorret 
ah hac." 

^ See a fuller account of this system under LiLcretvus. 



RELATION OF PHILOSOPHY TO RELIGION. 137 

Stoicism was far more congenial to the national character, and 
many great men professed it. Besides Laelius, who was a disciple 
of Diodes and Panaetius, we have the names of Entilius Eufus, 
Aelius Stilo, Balbus, and Scaevola. But during the tumultuous 
activity of these years it was not possible for men to cultivate 
philosophy with deep appreciation. Political struggles occupied 
their minds, and it was in their moments of relaxation only that 
the questions agitated by stoicism would be discussed. We must 
remember that as yet stoicism was one of several competing 
systems. Peripateticism and the Academy, as has been said, 
attracted the more sceptical or argumentative minds, for their dia- 
lectics were far superior to those of stoicism ; it was in its moral 
grandeur that stoicism towered not only above these but above 
aU other systems that have been invented, and the time for the 
full recognition of this moral grandeur had not yet come. At 
present men were occupied in discussing its logical quibbles and 
paradoxes, and in balancing its claims to cogency against those 
of its rivals. It was not until the significance of its central 
doctrine was tried to the uttermost by the dark tyranny of the 
Empire, that stoicism stood erect and alone as the sole represen- 
tative of all that was good and great. Still, the fact that its chief 
professors were men of weight in the state, lent it a certain 
authority, and Cicero, among the few definite doctrines that he 
accepts, numbers that of stoicism that virtue is sufficient for 
happiness. 

"We shall close this chapter with one or two remarks on the 
relation of philosophy to the state religion. It must be observed 
that the formal and unpliable nature of the Eoman cult made it 
quite unable to meet the requirements of advancing enlighten- 
ment. It was a superstition, not a religion ; it admitted neither 
of allegoric interpretation nor of poetical idealisation. Hence there 
was no alternative but to beheve or disbelieve it. There can be 
no doubt that all educated Eomans did the latter. The whole 
machinery of ritual and ceremonies was used for purely political 
ends ; it was no great step to regard it as having a purely political 
basis. To men with so slight a hold as this on the popular creed, 
the religion and philosophy of Greece were suddenly revealed. 
It was a spiritual no less than an intellectual revolution. Their 
views on the question of the unseen were profoundly changed. 
The simple but manly piety of the family religion, the regular 
ceremonial of the state, were confronted with the splendid hier- 
archy of the Greek Pantheon and the subtle questionings of Greek 
intellect. It is no wonder that Eoman conviction was, so to 
speak, taken by storm. The popular faith received a shock from 



138 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

which it never rallied. Augustus and others restored the ancient 
ritual, but no edict could restore the lost belief. So deep had 
the poison penetrated that no sound place was left. "With super- 
stition they cast off all religion. For poetical or imaginative 
purposes the Greek deities under their Latin dress might suffice, 
but for a guide of life they were utterly powerless. The nobler 
minds therefore naturally turned to philosophy, and here they 
found, if not certainty, a least a reasonable explanation of the 
problems they encountered. Is the world governed by law 1 If 
so, is that law a moral one ? If not, is the ruler chance 1 "What 
is the origin of the gods ? of man 1 of the soul 1 Questions like 
these could neither be resolved by the Roman nor by the Helleno- 
Eoman systems of religion, but they were met and in a way 
answered by Greek philosophy. Hence it became usual for every 
thinking Eoman to attach himself to the tenets of some sect, 
which ever best suited his own comprehension or prejudices. But 
this adhesion did not involve a rigid or exclusive devotion. Many 
were Eclectics, that is, adopted from various systems such elements 
as seemed to them most reasonable. For instance, Cicero was a 
Stoic more than anything else in his ethical theory, a New Acade- 
mician in his logic, and in other respects a Platonist. But even 
he varied greatly at different times. There was, however, . no 
combination among professors of the same sect with a view to 
practical work or dissemination of doctrines. Had such been 
attempted, it would at once have been put down by the state. 
But it never was. Philosophical beliefs of whatever kind did 
not in the least interfere with conformity to the state religion. 
One Scaevola was Pontifex Maximus, another was Augur ; Cicero 
himself was Augur, so was Caesar. The two things were kept 
quite distinct. Philosophy did not influence political action in 
any way. It was simply a refuge for the mind, such as all 
thinking men must have, and which if not supplied by a true 
creed, will inevitably be sought in a false or imperfect one. And 
the noble doctrines professed by the great Greek schools were 
certainly far more worthy of the adhesion of such men as Scaevola 
and Laelius, than the worn-out cult which the popular ceremonial 
embodied. 



BOOK II. 
THE GOLDEN AGE, 

FROM TEE CONSULSHIP OF CICERO TO THE DEATH OF 
AUGUSTUS (63 B.0.-14 A.O.). 



I 
I 



BOOK II. 



PART I. 

THE REPUBLICAN PERIOD. 



CHAPTER L 

Varro. 

The period embraced "by tlie present "book contains the culmina- 
tion of all kinds of literature, the drama alone excepted. It falls 
naturally into two divisions, each marked by special and clearly- 
defined characteristics. The first begins with the recognition of 
Cicero as the chief man of letters at Eome, and ends with the 
battle of Philippi, a year after his death. It extends over a 
period of two and twenty years (about 63-42 B.C.), though many 
of Cicero's orations are anterior, and some of Varro's works pos- 
terior, to the extreme dates. In this period Latin prose writing 
attained its perfection. The storms which shook and finally 
overthrew the Eepublic turned the attention of all minds to 
political questions. Oratory and history were the prevailing 
forms of intellectual activity. It was not until the close of the 
period that philosophy was treated by Cicero during his com- 
pulsory absence from public life ; and poetry rose once more into 
prominence in the works of Lucretius and Catullus. The chief 
characteristics of the literature of this period are freedom and 
vigour. In every author the bold spirit of the Eepublic breathes 
forth ; and in the greatest is happily combined with an extensive 
and elegant scholarship, equally removed from pedantry and 
dullness. 

The second division (42 B.C.-14 a.d.) begins shortly after the 
battle of Philippi, with the earhest poems of Varius and Virgil, and 
closes with the death of Augustus. It is pre-eminently an era of 



14:2 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

poets. Livy alone being a prose writer of the first rank, and is 
marked by all the characteristics of an imperial age. The 
transition from the last poems of Catullus to the first of Virgil ir 
complete. ISTevertheless, many republican authors lived on into 
this period, as Yarro, PoUio, and Bibaculus. But their character 
and genius belong to the Republic, and, with the exception of 
Pollio, they will be noticed under th& republican writers. The 
entire period represents the full maturity and perfection of the 
Latin language, and the epithet classical is by many restricted to 
the authors who wrote in it. It is best, however, not to narrow 
unnecessarily the sphere of classicahty ; to exclude Terence on the 
one hand or Tacitus and Phny on the other, would savour of 
artificial restriction rather than that of a natural classification. 

The first writer that comes before us is M. Terentius Yarro, 
116-28 B.C. He is at once the earliest and the latest of the series. 
His birth took place ten years before that of Cicero, and his death 
fifteen years after Cicero's murder, in the third year of the reign 
of Augustus. His long life was devoted almost entirely to study, 
and he became known even in his lifetime as the most learned of 
the Romans. This did not, however, prevent him from offering 
his services to the state when the state required them. He 
served more than once under Pompey, acquitting himself with 
distinction, so that in the civil war the important post of legatus 
was intrusted to him in company with Petreius and Afranius in 
Spain. But Yarro felt from the first his inability to cope with 
his adversary. Caesar speaks of him as acting coolly in Pompey's 
interest until the successes of Afranius at Ilerda roused him to 
more vigorous measures ; but the triumph of the Pompeians was 
shortlived ; and when Caesar convened the delegates at Corduba, 
Yarro found himself shut out from all the fortified towns, and in 
danger of being deserted by his army.^ He therefore surrendered 
at discretion, returned to Italy, and took no more part in pubhc 
affairs. We hear of him occasionally in Cicero's letters as studying in 
his country seats at Tusculum, Cumae, or Casinum, indifferent to 
politics, and preparing those great works of antiquarian research, 
which have immortalised his . name. Caesar's victorious return 
brought him out of his retreat. He was placed over the library 
which Caesar built for pubhc use, an appointment equally com- 
plimentary to Yarro and honourable to Caesar. Antony, how- 
ever, incapable of the generosity of his chief, placed Yarro's name 
on the list of the proscribed, at a time when the old man was over 

1 Caes, B. C. ii. 16-20. From i. 36, we learn that all further Spain had 
been intrusted to him. Varro was in truth no partisan ; so long as he be- 
lieved Pompey to represent the state, he was willing to act for him. 



TAKKO'S LIFE. 143 

seventy years of age, and liad long ceased to have any "weight in 
politics. JSTothing more clearly shows the abominable motives 
that swayed the triumvirs than this attempt to murder an aged 
and peaceful citizen for the sake of possessing his wealth. Tor 
Yarro had the good or bad fortune to be extremely rich. His 
Casine viUa, alluded to by Cicero, and partly described by him- 
self, was sumptuously decorated, and his other estates were large 
and productive. The Casine villa was made the scene of Antony's 
revelry; he and his fellow-rioters plundered the rooms, emptied 
the cellar, burned the library, and carried on every kind of 
debauchery and excess. Tew passages in all eloquence are more 
telling than that in which Cicero with terrible poM^er contrasts the 
conduct of the two successive occupants.^ Yarro, through the 
zeal of his friends, managed to escape Antony's fury, and for a 
time lay concealed in the villa of Calenus, at which Antony was a 
frequent visitor, little suspecting that his enemy was within his 
grasp. An edict was soon issued, however, exempting the old 
man from the effect of the proscription, so that he was enabled to 
hve in peace at Eome until his death. Eut deprived of his wealth 
(which Augustus afterwards restored), deprived of his friends, 
and above all, deprived of his library, he must have felt a deep 
shadow cast over his declining years. Nevertheless, he remained 
cheerful, and to all appearance contented, and charmed those who 
knew him by the vigour of his conversation and his varied anti- 
quarian lore. He is never mentioned by any of the Augustan 
writers. 

Yarro belongs to the genuine type of old Eoman, improved but 
not altered by Greek learning, with his heart fixed in the past, 
deeply conservative of everything national, and even in his style 
of speech protesting against the innovations of the day. H we 
reflect that when Yarro wrote his treatise on husbandry, Yirgil 
was at work on the Georgics, and then compare the diction of the 
two, it seems almost incredible that they should have been con- 
temporaries. In aU literature there is probably no such instance of 
rock-hke impenetrability to fashion; for him Alexandria might 
never have existed. He recalls the age of Cato rather than that 
of Cicero. His versatility was as great as his industry. There 
was scarcely any department of prose or poetry, provided it was 
national, in which he did not excel. His early life well fitted 
him for severe application. Eorn at Eeate, in the Sabine ter- 
ritory, which was the nurse of all manly virtues, ^ Yarro, as he 

1 Phil. ii. 40, 41. 

2 Cf. Hor. Ep. 2, 43, "Sabina qualis aut perusta solibus rernicis uxor 
Appuli." 



144 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURK 

himself tells us, had to rough it as a boy ; he went barefoot over 
the mountain side, rode without saddle or bridle, and wore but a 
single tunic. 1 Bold, frank, and sarcastic, he had all the qualities 
of the old-fashioned country gentleman. At Eome he became 
intimate with Aelius Stilo, whose opinion of his pupil is shown by 
the inscription of his grammatical treatise to him. Stilo's mantle 
descended on Varro, but with sevenfold virtue. Not oidy gram- 
mar, by which term we must understand philology and etymology 
as well as syntax, but antiquities secular and religious, and almost all 
the hberal arts, were passed under review by his encyclopaedic mind. 
At the same time lighter themes had strong attraction for him. 
He possessed in a high degree that racy and caustic wit which was 
a special ItaUan product, and had been conspicuous in Cato and 
Lucilius. But while Cato studied to be oracular, and Lucilius to 
be critical, Yarro seems to have indulged his vein without any 
special object. Though by no means a born poet, he had the 
faculty of writing terse and elegant verse when he chose, and in 
his younger days composed a long list of n^etrical works. There 
were among them Pseudotragoediae, which Xeuffel thinks were the 
same as the Hilarotragoediae, or Wdntlionicae^ so called from their 
inventor Ehinthon; though others class them with the KwuwSo- 
TpaywStat, of which Plautus's Amphitruo is the best known instance. 
However this may be, they jrere mock-heroic compositions in 
which the subjects consecrated by tragic usage were travestied or 
burlesqued. It is probable that they were mere literary exercises 
designed to beguile leisure or to facilitate the labour of composition, 
like the closet tragedies composed by Cicero and his brother 
Quintus; and Yarro certainly owed none of his fame to them. 
Other poems of his are referred to by Cicero, and perhaps by Quin- 
tilian;2 but in the absence of definite allusions we can hardly 
characterize them. There was one class of semi-poetical composi- 
tion which Yarro made peculiarly his own, the Satura Menippea, 
a medley of prose and verse, treating of all kinds of subjects just 
as they came to hand in the plebeian style, often with much gross- 
ness, but with sparkling point. Of these Saturae he wrote no less 
than 150 books, of which fragments have been preserved amount- 
ing to near 600 lines. Menippus of Gadara, the originator of this 
style of composition, lived about 280 B.C.; he interspersed jocular 
and commonplace topics with moral maxims and philosophical 
doctrines, and may have added contemporary pictures, though this 
is uncertain. 

^ Fr. of Catus. Cf. Juvenal, ** Usque adeo nihil est quod nostra infantia 
caelum Hausit Aventinum, baca nutrita Sabina ?" 
3 i. 4, 4. 



MENIPPEAN SATIRES. 145 

Varro followed Mm; we find him in the Academicae Quaestiones 
of Cicero/ saying that. he adopted this method in the hope of 
enticing the unlearned to read something that might profit them. 
In these saturae topics were handled with the greatest freedom. 
They were not satires in the modern sense. They are rather to he 
considered as lineal descendants of the old saturae which existed 
hefore any regular literature. They nevertheless embodied with 
unmistakable clearness Yarro's sentiments with regard to the pre- 
vailing luxury, and combined his thorough knowledge of all that 
best befitted a Roman to know with a racy freshness which we 
miss in his later works. The titles of many are preserved, and 
give some index to the character of the contents. We have some 
in Greek, e.g. MarcoTroXts or Trcpi apxrj'i, a sort of Yarro's Republic, 
after the manner of Plato ; 'Itttto/cuwv, Kwoppv^rcop, and others, 
satirizing the cynic philosophy. Some both in Greek and Latin, 
as Columnae Herculis, rrepl Soirj? ; est modus matulae, irepi fJiiOrjs; 
others in Latin only, as Mardpor the slave of Marcus {i.e. Yarro 
himself). Many are in the shape of proverbs, e.g. Longe fugit qui 
suos fugit ^ yvoidi (reavTov, nescis quid vesper serus veliat. Only two 
fragments are of any length; one from the Mardpor, in graceful 
iambic verse, ^ the other in prose from the nesds quid vesper.^ It 
consists of directions for a convivial meeting : " Nam muitos con- 
vivas esse non convenit, quod turha plerumque est turbidenta ; et 
Romae quidem constat: sed et Athenis; nusquam enim plures 
cubabant.* Ipsum deinde convivium constat ex rebus quatuor, et 
tum denique omnibus suis numeris absolutum est; si belli homun- 
culi collecti sunt, si lectus locus, si tempus lectum, si apparatus 
non neglectus. Nee loquaces autem convivas nee mutos legere 
oportet; quia eloquentia in foro et apud subsellia; silentium vero 
non in convivio sed in cubiculo esse debet. Quod prof ecto eveniet, 
si de id genus rebus ad communem vitae usum pertinentibus con- 
fabulemur, de quibus in foro atque in negotiis agendis loqui non est 
otium. Dominum autem convivii esse oportet non tam lautum 
quam sine sordihus. Et in convivio legi non omnia debent, sed ea 
potissimum quae simul sunt /SioicficXyj,^ et delectent potius, ut id 
quoque videatur non superfuisse. Bellaria ea maxime sunt mellita, 
quae mellita non sunt, Tre/x^acrtv enim et Triij/a societas infida." 
In this piece we see the fondness for punning, which even in his 
eightieth year had not left him. The last pun is not at first 

1 Ac. Post. i. 2, 8. He there speaks of them as Vetera nostra. 

2 Given in Appendix, note i. ^ Given in Aulus Gellius, xiii. xi. 1. 
* V. i., et Romae quidem stat, sedet Athenis, nusquam autem cubat. 

^ "We take occasion to observe the frequent insertion of Greek words, as in 
Lncilius and in Cicero's letters. These all recall the tone of high-bred con- 
versation, in which Greek terms were continually employed. 

K 



146 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

obyioTis; tlie meaning is that the nicest sweetmeats are those 
which are not too sweet, for made dishes are hostile to digestion ; 
or, as we may say, paraphrasing his diction, " Dehcacies are con- 
ducive to delicacy." It was from this satura the celebrated rule 
was taken that guests should be neither fewer than the graces, nor 
more than the muses. The whole subject of the Menippean 
satires is brilliantly treated in Mommsen's History of Rome, and 
Piese's edition of the satires, to both which, if he desire further 
information, we refer the reader. ^ 

The genius of Varro, however, more and more inclined him to 
prose. The next series of works that issued from his pen were 
probably those known as Logistorici (about 56-50 B.C.). The 
model for these was furnished by Heraclides Ponticus, a friend 
and pupil of Plato, and after his death, of Aristotle. He was a 
voluminous and encyclopaedic writer, but too indolent to apply the 
vigorous method of his master. Hence his works, being discursive 
and easily understood, were well fitted for the comprehension of the 
Eonians. Yarro's histories were short, mostly taken from his own 
or his friends' experience, and centred round some principle of 
ethics or economics. Catus de liheris educandis, Marius de For- 
tuna, &c. are titles which remind us of Cicero's Laelius de Ami- 
citia and Ccdo Major de Senedutc, of which it is extremely 
probable they were the suggesting causes. 

Yarro in his scdurae is very severe upon philosophers. He had 
almost as great a contempt for them as his archetype Cato. And 
yet Yarro was deeply read in the philosophy of Greece. He did 
not yield to Cicero in admiration of her illustrious thinkers. It 
is probable that with his, keen appreciation of the Eoman character 
he saw that it was unfitted for speculative thought; that in most 
cases its cultivation would only bring forth pedants or hypocrites. 
When asked by Cicero why he had not written a great philosophical 
work, he replied that those who had a real interest in the study 
would go direct to the fountain head, those who had not would be 
none the better for reading a Latin compendium. Hence he pre- 
ferred to turn his labours into a more productive channel, and to 
instruct the people in their own antiquities, which had never been 
adequately studied, and, now that Stilo was dead, seemed likely to 
23ass into oblivion. ^ His researches occupied three main fields, 
that of law and religion, that of civil history and biography, and 
that of philology. 

Of these the first was the one for which he was most highly 
qualified, and in which he gained his highest renown. His 

1 Mommsen, vol iv. pt. 2, p. 594 ; Eiese, Men. Satur. Reliquiae, Lips. 1865, 

2 See the interesting discussion in Cicero, Acad. Post. I. 



TEEATISE ON DIVINE AND HUMAN ANTIQUITIES. 147 

crowning work in this department was tlie Antiquities Divine and 
Human, in 41 books. ^ This was the greatest monument of Eoman 
learning, the reference book for all subsequent writers. It is 
quoted continually by Pliny, Gellius, and Priscian ; and, what is 
more interesting to us, by St Augustine in the fifth and seventh 
books of his Civitas Dei, as the one authoritative work on the subject 
of the national religion. ^ He thus describes the plan of the work. 
It consisted of 41 books; 25 of human antiquities, 16 of divine. 
In the human part, 6 books were given to each of the four divi- 
sions ; viz. of Agents, of Places, of Times, of Things.^ To these 
24 one prefatory chapter was prefixed of a general character, thus 
completmg the number. In the divine part a similar method was 
followed. Three books were allotted to each of the five divisions 
of the subject, viz. the Men who sacrifice, the Places^ and Times 
of worsliip,* the Eites performed, and finally the Divine Beings 
themselves. To these was prefixed a book treating the subject 
comprehensively, and of a prefatory nature. The five triads were 
thus subdivided : the first into a book on Pontifices, one on 
Augurs, one on Quinderimviri Sacrorum ; the second into books 
on shrines, temples, and sacred spots, respectively ; the third into 
those on festivals and hohdays, the games of the circus, and 
theatrical spectacles ; the fourth treats of consecrations, private 
rites, and public sacrifices, while th« fifth has one treatise on gods 
that certainly exist, one on gods that are doubtful, and one on the 
chief and select deities. 

We have given the particulars of this division to show the 
almost pedantic love of system that Yarro indulged. Nearly all 
Ills books were parcelled out on a similar methodical plan. He 
had no idea of following the natural divisions of a subject, but 
always imposed on his subject artificial categories drawn from his 
own prepossessions.^ The remark has been made that of all 
Romans Yarro was the most unphdosophical. Certainly if a true 
classification be the basis of a truly scientific treatment, Yarro 
can lay no claim to it. His erudition, though profound, is 
cumbrous. He never seems to move easily in it. His iUustra- 

1 Antiquitates rerum 'humanai'um et divinarum. 

2 He also quotes the Aeneid as a source of religious ideas. Civ. D. v. 
18, 19, et al. 

3 C. D. vi, 3, qui agant, ubi agant, quaudo agaut, quid agant, 

^ Qui exhibeant (sacra), ubi exhibeant, quando exhibeant, quid exhibeant, 
quibus exhibeant. 

^ Plato says, 'S.woiniKbs 6 dia\€KTiKhs ; the true philosopher can embrace the 
TV-hole of his subject ; at the same time, re/jivei kut &pepa ; he carves it accord- 
ing to the joints, not according to his notions where the joints should be 
(JfJiaedr.) But the Romans only understood Plato's popular side. 



148 HISTOKY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

tions are far-fetclied, often inopportune. "What, for instance, can 
be more out of place than to bring to a close a discussion on 
farming by the sudden announcement of a hideous murder 1 ^ His 
style is as uncouth as his arrangement is unnatural. It abounds 
in constructions which cannot be justified by strict rules of syntax, 
e.g. " hi qui pueros in ludum mittunt, idem barbatos . . . non 
docehimus ? " ^ " When we send our children to school to learn 
to speak correctly, shall we not also correct bearded men, when 
they make mistakes'?" Slipshod constructions like this occur 
throughout the treatise on the Latin tongue, though, it is true, 
they are almost entirely absent from that on husbandry, which is 
a much more finished work. Obscurity in explaining what the 
author means, or in describing what he has seen, is so frequent an 
accompaniment of vast erudition that it need excite little surprise. 
And yet how different it is from the matchless clearness of Cicero 
or Caesar ! In the treatise on husbandry, Varro is at great pains 
to describe a magnificent aviary in his villa at Casinum, but his 
auditors must have been clear-headed indeed if they could follow 
his description.^ And in the De Mngua Latina, wishing to show 
how the elephant was called Luca bos from having been first seen 
in Lucania with the armies of Pyrrhus, and from the ox being 
the largest quadruped with which the Italians were then acquainted, 
he gives us the following involved note — In Vh-gilii commentario 
erat : Ab Lucanis Lucas ; ab eo quod nostri, quoin maximam qua- 
drupedem, quam ipsi haberent, vocarent bovem, et in Lucanis PyriM 
bello primum vidissent apud liostes elephant os, Lucanum bovem 
quod putabant iMcam bovem appellassent. 

In fact Yarro was no stylist. He was a master of facts, as 
Cicero of words. Studiosum rerum, says Augustine, tantum docetj 
quantum studiosum verborum Cicero deleetat. Hence Cicero, with 
all his proneness to exaggerate the excellences of his friends, 
never speaks of him as eloquent. He calls him omnium facile 
acidissimus, et sine ulla dubitatione doctissimus.^ The qualities 
that shone out conspicuously in his works were, besides learning, 
a genial though somev^hat caustic humour, and a thorough contempt 
for effeminacy of aU kinds. The fop, the epicure, the warbhng 
poet who gargled his throat before murmuring his recondite ditty, 
the purist, and above all the mock-philosopher witH his nostrum 
for purifying the world, these are aU caricatured by Yarro in his 
pithy, good-humoured way ; the spirit of the Menippean satires 
remained, though the form was changed to one more befitting the 

1 See the end of the Res Rust. Bk. i. 

2 L. L. ix. 15 ; cf. vi. 82, x. 16, v. 88. » j^, r, ^ 5^ 
* Acad. Post. i. 3. 



TREATISE ON DIVINE AND HUMAN ANTIQUITIES. 149 

grave old teacher of wisdom. The fragments of his works as well 
as the notices of his friends present him to us the very picture of 
a healthy-minded and healthy-bodied man. 

To return to the consideration of his treatise on Antiquities, 
from which we have digressed. The great interest of the subject 
will be our excuse for dwelling longer upon it. There is no Latin 
book the recovery of which the present century would hail with 
so much pleasure as this. When antiquarianism is leading to 
such fruitful results, and the study of ancient religion is so 
earnestly pursued, the aid of Yarro's research would be invaluable. 
And it is the more disappointing to lose it, since we have reason 
for believing that it was in existence during the hfetime of 
Petrarch. He declares that he saw it when a boy, and afterwards, 
when he knew its value, tried all means, but without success, to 
obtain it. This story has been doubted, chiefly on the ground 
that direct quotations from the work are not made after the sixth 
century. Eut this by itself is scarcely a sufficient reason, since 
the Church gathered all the knowledge of it she required from the 
writings of St Augustine. From him we learn that Varro feared 
the entire collapse of the old faith ; that he attributed its dechne 
in some measure to the outward representations of divine objects ; 
and, observing that Eome had existed 170 years without any 
image in her temples, instanced Judea to prove " eos qui primi 
simulacra deorum populis posuerunt, eos civitatihus suis et metum 
dempsisse, et errorem addidisse.^ Other fragments of deep interest 
are preserved by Augustine. One, showing the conception of the 
state religion as a purely human institution, explains why human 
antiquities are placed before divine, " Sicut prior est pidor quam 
tabula pida, prior faher quam aedificium ; ita priores sunt civi- 
tates, quam ea quae a civitatibus instituta sunt." Another de- 
scribes the different classes of theology, according to a division 
first made by the Pontifex Scaevola,^ as poetical, philosophical, 
and political, or as mythical, physical, and civil. ^ Against the first 
of these Varro fulminated forth all the shafts of his satire : In eo 
multa sunt contra dignitatem et naturam immortalium ficta . . . 
quae non modo in liominem, sed etiam quae in contemptissimum 
hominem cadere possunt. About the second he did not say much, 
except guardedly to imply that it was not fitted for a popular 
ceremonial. The third, which it was his strong desire to keep 
alive, as it was afterwards that of Virgil, seemed to him the chief 
glory of Eome. He did not scruple to say (and Polybius had 
said it before him) that the grandeur of the Eepublic was due to 

1 Civ. Dei iv. 31. 2 cic. De Or. i. 39 ; N". D. ii. 24. 

^ Civ. Dei vi. 5, 



I 



150 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

the piety of the Eepublic. It was reserved for the philosopher of 
a later age^ to asperse with bitter ridicule ceremonies to which all 
before liim had conformed while they disbeheved, and had respected 
while seeing through their object. 

Varro dedicated his work to Caesar, who was then Pontifex 
Maximus, and well able to appreciate the chain of reasoning it 
contained. The acute mind of Yarro had doubtless seen in Caesar 
a disposition to rehabilitate the fallen ceremonial, and foreseeing 
his supremacy in the state, had laid before him this great manual 
for his guidance. Caesar evinced the deepest respect for Yarro, 
and must have carefully studied his views. At least it can be no 
mere coincidence that Augustus, in carrying out his predecessor's 
plans for the restoration of pubhc worship, should have followed 
so closely on the lines which we see from Augustine Yarro struck 
out. To consider Yarro 's labours as undirected to any practical 
object would be to misinterpret them altogether. No man was 
less of the mere savant or the mere litterateur than he. 

Besides this larger work Yarro seems to have written smaller 
ones, as introductions or pendants to it. Among these were the 
Atrta, or rationale of Eoman manners and customs, and a work de 
gente populi Romani, the most noticeable feature of which was its 
chronological calculation, which fixed the building of Eome to 
the date now generally received, and called the Yarronian Era 
(753 B.C.). It contained also computations and theories with 
regard to the early history of many other states with which Eome 
came in contact, e.g. Athens, Argos, etc., and is referred to more 
than once by St Augustine. ^ The names of many other treatises 
on this subject are preserved ; and this is not surprising, when we 
learn that no less than 620 books belonging to 74 difi'erent works 
can be traced to his indefatigable pen, so that, as an ancient critic 
says, " so much has he written that it seems impossible he could 
have read anything, so much has he read that it seems incredible 
he could have written anything." 

In the domain of history and biography he was somewhat less 
active. He wrote, however, memoirs of his campaigns, and a 
short biography of Pompey. A work of his, first mentioned by 
Cicero, to which peculiar interest attaches, is the Imagines or 
Hehdomades, called by Cicero " UcTrXoypatf^ia Yarronis."^ It was a 
series of portraits — 700 in all — of Greek and Eoman celebrities,^ 

1 Seneca. 2 Q[y^ j)ei xviii. 9, 10, 17. 

3 Ad Att. xvi. 11. The Greek term simply means "a gallery of distin- 
guished persons," analogously named after the TldirXos of Athene, on which 
the exploits of great heroes were embroidered. 

■* That on Demetrius Poliorcetes is preserved : " Hie Demetrius aeneis tot 
aptust Quot luces habet annus exsolutus" {aeneis =hronze statues). 



TREATISE ON THE LATIN LANGUAGE. 151 

with a sliort biograpliy attaclied to each, and a metrical epigram 
as well. This was intended to be, and soon became, a popular 
work. An abridged edition was issued shortly after the first, 39 
B.C. no doubt to meet the increased demand. This work is men- 
tioned by Phny as embodying a new and most acceptable process,^ 
whereby the impressions of the portraits were multiplied, and the 
reading public could acquaint themselves with the physiognomy 
and features of great men.^ What this process was has been the 
subject of much doubt. Some tliink it was merely an improved 
method of miniature drawing, others, dwelling on the general 
acceptableness of the invention, strongly contend that it was some 
method of multiplying the portraits like that of copper or wood 
engraving, and this seems by far the most probable view ; but what 
the method was the notices are much too vague for us to determine. 
The next works to be noticed are those on practical science. 
As far as we can judge he seems to have imitated Cato in bringing 
out a kind of encyclopaedia, adapted for general readers. Augus- 
tine speaks of him as having exhaustively treated the whole 
circle of the liberal, or as he prefers to call it, the secular arts.^ 
Those to which most weight were attached would seem to have 
been grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, medicine, and geometry. 
From one or two passages that are preserved, we should be 
inclined to fancy that Varro attached a superstitious (almost a 
Pythagorean) importance to numbers.* He himself was not an 
adherent of any system, but as Mommsen quaintly expresses it, 
he led a blind dance between them all, veering now to one now 
to another, as he wished to avoid any unpleasant conclusion or 
to catch at some attractive idea. I^ot strictly connected with the 
Encyclopaedia, but going to some extent over the same ground 
though in a far more thorough and systematic way, was the 
great treatise De Lingua Latina, in twenty-five books, of which the 
first four were dedicated to Septimius, the last twenty-one (to the 
orator's infinite delight) to Cicero. Few things gave Cicero 
greater pleasure than this testimony of Varro's regard. "With his 
insatiable appetite for praise, he could not but observe with 
regret that Varro, trusted by Pompey, courted by Caesar, and 
reverenced by all ahke, had never made any confidential advances 
to him. Probably the deeply-read student and simple-natured 
man failed to appreciate the more brilliant, if less profound, 
scholarship of the orator, and the vacillation and complexity of 

^ Plin. XXXV. 2 ; benignissimum inventum. 

2 See Bekker's Gallus, p. 30, where the whole subject is discussed. 

3 Civ. Dei, vi. 2. 

* Aul. Geil. ill. 10, quotes also from the EebdoToades in support of this. 



1 52 HISTOEY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

his character. While Cicero loaded him with praises and pro 
testations of friendship, Varro appears to have maintained a some- 
what cool or distant attitude. At last, however, this reserve was 
broken through. In 47 b.c. he seems to have promised Cicero to 
dedicate a work to him, which by its magnitude and interest 
required careful labour. In the letter prefixed to the posterior 
Academica^ 45 b.c., Cicero evinces much impatience at having 
been kept two years waiting for his promised boon, and inscribes 
his own treatise with Yarro's name as a pohte reminder which 
he hopes his friend wiU not think immodest. In the opening 
chapters Cicero extols Varro's learning with that warmth of heart 
and total absence of jealousy which form so pleasing a trait in 
his character. Their diffuseness amusingly contrasts with Varro's 
brevity in his dedication. When it appeared, there occurred not 
a word of compliment, nothing beyond the bare announcement In 
his ad te scriham.^ Truly Yarro was no "mutual admirationist." 
C. 0. Miiller, who has edited this treatise with great care, is of 
opinion that it was never completely finished. He argues partly 
from the words politius a me limardur^ put into Yarro's mouth by 
Cicero, partly from the civil troubles and the perils into which 
Yarro's Hfe was placed, partly from the loose unpolished character 
of the work, that it represents a first draught intended, but not 
ready for, pubUcation. For example, the same thing is treated 
more than once ; Juhar is twice illustrated by the same quota- 
tion,2 Canis is twice derived from canere ; ^ merces is differently 
explained in two places ; * Dympha is derived both from lapsus 
aquae^ and from Nympha ; ^ vaticinari from vesanus and versihus 
viendis.^ Again marginal additions or corrections, which have 
been the means of destroying the syntactical connection, seemed 
to have been placed in the text by the author.'' Other insertions 
of a more important character though they illustrate the point, 
yet break the thread of thought ; and in one book, the seventh, 
the want of order is so apparent that its fmished character could 
hardly be maintained. These facts lead him to conclude that the 
book was published without his knowledge, and perhaps against his 

^ Miiller notices with justice the mistake of Cicero in putting down Varro 
as a disciple of Antiochus, whereas the frequent philosophical remarks 
scattered throughout the De Lingua Latina point to the conclusion that at 
this time, Varro had become attached to the doctrines of stoicism. It is 
evident that there was no real intimacy between him and Cicero. See ad 
Att. xiii. 12, 19 ; Fam. ix. 8. 

2 vi. 6, vii. 76. 3 y. 92, vii. 32. ^ y. 44, 178. ^ y. 71^ yii. 87. 

« vi. 52, vii. 36. 

^ rii. 60 ; where, after a quotation from Plautus, we have — ** hoc itidem in 
CoroUaria Naevius ; idem in Curculione ait," — where the words from hor. 
to Naevitcs are an after addition. Cf. vii. 54. 



TREATISE ON THE LATIN LANGUAGE. 153 

will, "by those wlio pillaged Ms library. It is obvious that this is a 
theory which can neither be proved nor disproved. It is an ingeni- 
ous excuse for Yarro's neghgence in not putting his excellent mate- 
rials together with more care. The plan of the work is as follows : — 
Book I. — On the origin of the Latin language. 
Books II.-YJI. First Part. — On the imposition of names. 
Thus subdivided — 

a ii-iv. On etymology. ii. What can be said against it. 
iii. What can be said for it. 
iv. About its form and character. 
h v.-vii Origin of words, v. Names of places and all that is in 

them. 
vi I^ames of time, things that happen 

in time, &c. 
vii Poetical words. 
Books VIII. -XIII. Second Part. — On declension and inflec- 
tion. Again subdivided — 
a viiL-x. The general method {discipUna) of declension. 

viii. Against a universal analogy ob- 
taining. 
ix. In favour of it. 
X. On the theory of declension. 
b xi.-xiii. On the special declensions. 

Books XIY.-XXY. Third Part. — On syntax {Quemadmodum 
verba inter se coniungantur). 

Of this elaborate treatise only books Y.-X. remain, and those 
in a mutilated and unsatisfactory condition, so that we are unable 
to form a clear idea of the value of the whole. Moreover, much 
of what we have is rendered useless, except for antiquarian pur- 
poses, by the extremely crude notions of etymology displayed. 
Caelum is from cavus, or from chaos; terra from teri, quia teritur; 
Sol from solus; lepus from levipes, &c. The seventh book must 
always be a repertory of interesting quotations, many of which are 
not found elsewhere; and the essay on Analogia in books IX. and 
X. is well worthy of study, as sho^^dng on what sort of premises 
the ancients formed their grammatical reasonings. The work on 
grammar was followed or preceded by another on philosophy on 
a precisely similar plan. This was studied, hke so many of his 
other works, by Tertullian, Jerome, and Augustine. Its store of 
facts was no doubt remarkable, but as a popular exposition of 
philosophical ideas, it must have been very inferior to the 
treatises of Cicero. 

The last or nearly the last book he wrote was the treatise on 
agriculture, De Re Rusticay which has fortunately come down to ua 



L 



154 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

entire ; and with tlie kindred works of Cato and Columella, forma 
one of the most deeply interesting products of the Eoman mind. 
It is in three books : the first dedicated to his wife Fundania, the 
second to Turanius Mger, the third to Pinnius. Varro was in his 
81st year when he drew upon his memory and experience for this 
congenial work, 36 b.o. The destruction of his library had thrown 
him on his o^vn resources to a great extent; nevertheless, the 
amount of book-lore which he displays in this dialogue is enor- 
mous. The design is mapped out, as in his other treatises, with 
stately precision. He meets some friends at the temple of TeUus 
by appointment with the sacristan, "a6 aeditimo,?^^ dicer e didicimus 
a patrihus nostris ; ut corrigimur ab recentihus urbanis, ah aedituo. 
These friends' names, Fundanius, Agrius, and Agrasius, suggest the 
nature of the conversation, which turns mainly on the purchase 
and cultivation of land and stock. They are soon joined by 
Licinius Stolo and TremeUius Scrofa, the last-mentioned being the 
highest living authority on agricultural matters. The conversation 
is carried on with zest, and somewhat more naturally than in 
Cicero's dialogues. A warm eulogy is passed on the soil, climate, 
and cultivation of Italy, the whole party agreeing that it exceeds 
in natural blessings all other lands. The first book contains 
directions for raising crops of all kinds as well as vegetables and 
flowers, and is brought to an abrupt termination by the arrival of 
the priest's freedman who narrates the murder of his master. The 
party promise to attend the funeral, and with the sarcastic reflection 
de casu humano magis querentes quam admir antes id Romae factum, 
the book ends. The next treats of stock (de re pecuaria), and one 
or two new personages are introduced, as Mennas, Murius, and 
Yaccius (the last, of course, taking on himseK to speak of kine), 
and ends with an account oi the dairy and sheep-shearing. The third 
is devoted to an account of the preserves (de villicis pastionihus) 
which includes aviaries, whether for pleasure or profit, fish-tanks, 
deer-forests, rabbit-warrens, and all such luxuries of a country 
house as are independent of tillage or pasturage — and a most 
brilliant catalogue it is. As Varro and his friends, most of whom 
are called by the names of birds (Merula, Pavo, Pica, and Passer), 
discourse to one another of their various country seats, and as they 
mention those of other senators, more or less splendid than their 
own, we recognise the pride and grandeur of those few Eoman 
families who at this time parcelled out between them the riches of 
the world. Varro, whose life had been peaceful and unambitious, 
had realized enough to possess three princely villas, in one of which 
there was a marble aviary, "with a ddck-pond, bosquet, rosary, and 
two spacious colonnades attached, in which were kept, solely foi 



DIALOGUE DE EE RUSTIC A. 155 

the master's pleasure, 3000 of the choicest songsters of the wood. 
That grosser taste which fattened these beautiful beings for the 
table or the market was foreign to him ; as also was the affectation 
which had made Hortensius sacrifice his career to the enjoyment 
of his pets. There is something almost terrible in the thought 
that the costly luxuries of which these haughty nobles talk with 
so much urbanity, were wrung from the wretched provincials by 
every kind of extortion and excess ; that bribes of untold - value 
passed from the hands of cringing monarchs into those of violent 
proconsuls, to minister to the lust and greed, or at best to the 
wanton luxury, of a small governing class. In Yarro's pleasant 
dialogue we see the bright side of the picture ; in the speeches of 
Cicero the dark side. Doubtless there is a charm about the lofty 
pride that brooks no superior on earth, and almost without know- 
ing it, treats other nations as mere ministers to its comfort : but 
the nemesis was close at hand ; those who could not stoop to assist 
as seconds in the work of government must lie as victims beneath 
the assassin's knife or the heel of the upstart freedman. 

The style of this work is much more pleasing than that of the 
Latin Language. It is brisk and pointed, and shows none of the 
signs of old age. It abounds with proverbs,^ patriotic reflections, 
and ancient lore,^ but is nevertheless disfigured with occasional 
faults, especially the uncritical acceptance of marvels, such as the 
impregnation of mares by the ^-ind^ (" a?z incredible tiling but never- 
theless true") ; the production of bees from dead meat (both of which 
puerilities are repeated unquestioningly by Yirgil), the custom of 
wolves plunging swine into cold water to cool their flesh which is so 
hot as to be otherwise quite uneatable, and of shrew mice occasionally 
gnawing a nest for themselves and rearing their young in the hide 
of a fat sow, &cA He also attempts one or two etymologies ; the 
best is via, which he teUs us is for veha, and villa for veliula ; 
capra from capere is less plausible. Altogether this must be 
placed at the head of the Eoman treatises on husbandry as being 
at once the work of a man of practical experience, which Cato was, 
and Columella was not, and of elegant and varied learning, to 
which Columella might, but Cato could not, pretend. There is, 
indeed, rather too great a parade of erudition, so much so aa 
occasionally to encumber the work ; but the general efi'ect is very 

L* E.g. humo bullae -Di facientes adiuvant — Komani sedentes vincnnt. 
^ Varro refuses to invoke tbe Greek gods, but turns to the old rustic di 
Consentes, Jupiter, Tellus ; Sol, Luna ; Robigus, Flora ; Minerva, Venus 
Liber, Ceres ; Lympha and Bonus Eventus. A motley catalogue I 
^ ii. 4. •* ii. 4. 



156 



HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 



pleasing, and more particularly the tMrd book, wMcli shows us the 
calm and innocent life of one, who, during the turbulent and 
bloody climax of political strife, sought in the great recollections 
of the past a solace for evils which he was powerless to cure, and 
whose end he could not foresee. 



APPEl^DIX. 



Note I. — The Menippean Satires of Varro. 



The reader will find all the informa- 
tion on this subject in Riese's edition 
of the Menippean Satires, Leipsic, 
1865. We append a few fragments 
showing their style, language, and 
metrical treatment. 

(1) From the 6.fiixov /ierpeis. 

♦• Qu^m secuntur cilm mtilndis v^itfs lev^s 
pdrmis 
Ante sfgnanf quadr^tismiiltisfgnibils t^cti." 

We observe here the rare rhythm, 
analogous to the iambic scazon, of a 
trochaic tetrameter with a long pen- 
ultimate syllable. 

(2) From the 'AuepconoTroXis. 

•• Non lit thesauris non auro pectu' solutum; 
N(in demunt animis cuvas et religiones 
Peisanim montes, non atria diviti' Crassi." 

The style here reminds us strongly of 
Horace. 

(3) From the Bimarciis. 

"Ttlnc repente caflitum ^Itum t6nitribiis 

teniplum tondscat, 
Et pater divdin trisulcum fiilmen fgni fe'r- 

vido Return 
Mfttat ia tholum macelli. 

(4) From the DoUum aut Seria, in 
anapaestics. 

"Mundus domus est maxima homulli 
Quam quinque ultitonae flammigerae 
Zonae cingunt per quam limbus 



Bix sex signis stellumicantibus 
Aptus in obliquo aethere Lunae 
Bigas acceptat." 

The sentiment reminds us of Plato. 

(5) From the Est modus matulae, on 

wine. 
" Vino nihil iucundius quisquam bibit 
Hoc aegritudinem ad medendam invene- 

runt, 
Hoc hilaritatis dulce seminarium, 
Hoc continet coagulum convivia." 

(6) From the Euvienides, in galli- 
ambics, from which those of Catul- 
lus may be a study. 

"Tibi typana non in^nes sonitus Matri' 
Deum 
Tonimii', canimu' tibf nos tibi nilnc semi- 

viif; 
Teret^m comam vol^ntem iact^nt tibi 
Gallf" 

(7) From the Marcipor^ a fine 
description. 

" Repente noctis circiter meridie 
Cum pictus aer fervidis late ignibus 
Caeli chorean astiicen ostenderet 
Nubes aquali frigido velo leves 
Caeii cavernas aureas subduxerant 
A^uam vomentes inferam mortalibus 
Veiitique frigido se ab axe erupei'ant, 
Phrenetici septentrionum filii 
Secum ferentes regulas ramos syius. 
At nos caduci naufragi ut ciconiae, 
Quaruiii bipinnis fulminis plumas vapor 
Percussit, alte maesti in teriam cecidimus." 



Note II. — The Logistorici. 



The Logistorici, which, as we have 
said, were imitated from Heraclides 
Ponticus, are alluded to under the 
name 'Hpo/c\€iSe?oj/ by Cicero. He 
says (Att. xy. 27, 2), Excudam ali- 
quid 'UpaKXeiBuou, quod lateat in 
thesaurii tuis ; (xvi. 2, 6) 'Hpa/cAei- 



de7ou, si Brundisium salvi, adoriemur. 
In xvi. 3, 1 , he alludes to the work as 
his Cato Major de Senectute. Varro 
had promised him a 'Hpa.^cAeiSeroi/. 
Varro ... a quo adhuc 'Hp. illud 
non abstuli (xvi. 11, 3), he received 
it (xvi. 12). 



NOTES. 



157 



Note III. — Some Fragments of Yourro Atacinus, 



This poet, who is by later writers 
often confounded withYarro Eeatinus, 
was ranch more finished in his style, 
and therefore more read by the Au- 
gustan writers. Frequently when 
they speak of Varro it is to him that 
they refer. "We append some passages 
from his Chorographia, 



" Vidit et aetherio mundnm torquerier axe 
Et septera aeternis sonitum dare vocibus 

orbes, 
Nitentes aliis alios quae maxima divis 
Laetitia est. At tunc longe gratissima 

Phoebi 
Dextera conslmiles meditatur reddere 
voces." 

11. 
" Erpo inter solis stationem ad sidera septem 
Exporrecta iacet tt-llus: huic extimatluctu 
Occaui, interior Neptuno cingitiir ora." 

III. 

" At qninquft aetheriis zonis accingitur orbis 

Ac vastant imas hiemes mediamque calores: 



Sed terrae extremas inter mediamque col. 

untur 
Quas solis valido numquam vis atterat 

igne'." 

From the EpTiemeris, two passages 
which Yirgil has copied. 



" Tom liceat pelagi volucres tardaeque paln- 
dis 
Cernere inexpleto studio gestire lavandi 
Et velut insolitum pennis infundere rorem. 
Aut aiguta lacus ciicumvolitavit hirundo." 



" Et vos snspiciens caelum (mirabile vfsu) 
Naribus aerium patulis decerpsit odoi em, 
Kec tenuis formica Cdvis non erehit ova." 

An epigram attributed to him, but 
protably of somewhat later date, is 
as follows : 

"Marmoreo Licinus ttimulo iacet, at Cato 
parvo ; 
Pompeius nullo. Ciedimus esse deos V* 



Note IY. — On the Jurists, Critics, and Grammarians of less note. 



The study of law had received a 
great impulse from the labours of 
Scaevola. But among his successors 
none can be named beside him, 
though many attained to a respectable 
eminence. The business of public 
life had now become so engrossing 
that statesmen had no leisure to 
study law deeply, nor jurists to de- 
vote themselves to politics. Hence 
there was a gradual divergence be- 
tween the two careers, and universal 
principles began to make themselves 
felt in jurisprudence. The chief name 
of this period is Sulpicizis Rifus (born 
105 B.C.), who is mentioned with 
great respect in Cicero's Brutus as a 
high-minded man and a cultivated 
student. His contribution lay rather 
in methodical treatment than in 
amassing new material. Speeches 
are also attributed to him (Quint, iv. 
2, 106), though sometimes there is 
an uncertainty whether the older 
orator is not meant. Letters of his 
are preserved among those of Cicero, 
and show the extreme purity of lan- 



guage attained by the highly edu- 
cated (Ad Fam. iv, 5). Other jurists 
are P. Orhius, a pupil of Juventius, 
of whom Cicero thought highly ; 
Ateius, probably the father of that 
Ateius Capito who obtained great 
celebrity in the next period, and 
Paatvius Lahco, whose fame was also 
eclipsed by that of his son. Some- 
what later we find C. Trehatius, the 
friend of Cicero and recipient of 
some of his most interesting letters. 
He was a brilliant but not profound 
lawyer, and devoted himself more 
particularly to the pontilical law. 
His dexterous conduct through the 
civil wars enabled him to preserve 
his influence under the reign of Au- 
gustus. Horace professes to ask his 
advice (Sat. ii. 1, 4) : 

"Docte Trebati 
Quid faciam, praescribc." 

Trebatius replies: "Cease to write, 
or if you cannot do that, celebrate 
the exploits of Caesar." This cour- 
tier-like counsel is characteristic of 
the man, and helps to explain the 



158 



BISTORY OF EOMA^ LITERATUEE. 



high position he was enabled to take 
under the empire. Two other jurists 
are worthy of mention, A. Cascellius, 
a contemporary of Trebatius, and 
noted for his sarcastic wit ; and Q. 
Aelius Tuhero, who wrote also on 
history and rhetoric, but finally gave 
himself exclusively to legal studies. 

Among grammatical critics, the 
most important is P. Nigidius Mjulus 
(98-46 B.C.). He was, like Varro, 
conservative in his views, and is con- 
sidered by Geliius to come next to 
him in erudition. They appear to 
have been generally coupled together 
by later writers, but probably from 
the similarity of their studies rather 
than from any equality of talent. 
Nigidius was a mystic, and devoted 
much of his time to Pythagorean 
speculations, and the celebration of 
various religious mysteries. His 
Commentarii treated of grammar, 
orthography, etymology, &c. In the 
latter he appears to have copied Varro 
in deriving all Latin words from native 
roots. Besides grammar, he M'rote 
on sacrificial rites, on theology {de 
dis), and natural science. One or 
two references are made to him in 
the curious Apology of Apuleius. In 
the investigation of the supernatural 
he was followed by Caecina, who 
wrote on the Etruscan ceremonial, 
and drew up a theory of portents and 
prodigies. 

The younger generation produced 
few grammarians of merit. We hear 
of Ateiu3 Fraetextatus, who was 



I equally well known as a rhetorican. 
He was born at Athens, set free for 
his attainments, and called himself 
Philologus (Suet. De Gram. 10). He 
seems to have had some influence 
with the young nobles, with whom 
a teacher of grammar, who was also 
a fluent and persuasive speaker, was 
always welcome. Another instance 
is found in Valerius Goto, who lost 
his patrimony when quite a youth 
by the rapacity of Sulla, and was 
compelled to teach in order to obtain 
a living. He speedily became popu- 
lar, and was considered an excellent 
trainer of poets. He is called — 
" Cato Grammaticus, Latina Siren, 
Qui solus legit et facit poetas." 

Having acquired a moderate fortune 
and bought a villa at Tusculum, he 
sank through mismanagement again 
into poverty, from which he never 
emerged, but died inagarret, destitute 
of the necessaries of life. His fate 
was the subject of several epigrams, 
of which one by Bibaculus is pre- 
served in Suetonius (De Gr. ii). 

The only other name worth notice 
is that of Santra, who is called by 
Martial Salebrosus. He seems to 
have written chiefly on the history 
of Eoman literature, and, in par- 
ticular, to have commented on the 
poems of Naevius. Many obscurer 
writers are mentioned in Suetonius's 
treatise, to which, with that on 
rhetoric by the same author, the 
reader is here referred. 



CHAPTER IL 

Oratory and Philosophy — Cicero (106-43 b.c.). 

Marcus Tullius Cicero,^ the greatest name in Eoman literature, 
was born on his father's estate near Arpinum, 3d Jan. 106 B.C. 
Arpinum had received the citizenship some time before, but his 
family though old and of equestrian position had never held any 
office in Eome. Cicero was therefore a novus liomo, a parvenu^ 
as we should say, and this made the struggle for honours which 
occupied the greater part of his career, both unusual and arduous. 
For this struggle,- in which his extraordinary talent seemed to 
predict success, his father determined to prepare the boy by an 
education under his own eye in Eome. Marcus lived there for 
some years with his brother Quintus, studying under the best 
masters (among whom was the poet Archias), learning the prin- 
ciples of grammar and rhetoric, and storing his mind with the 
great works of Greek literature. He now made the acquaintance of 
the three celebrated men to whom he so often refers in his writings, 
the Augur Mucins Scaevola, and the orators Crassus and Antonius, 
with whom he often conversed, and asked them such questions as 
his boyish modesty permitted. At this time too he made his first 
essays in verse, the poem called Pontius Glaucus, and perhaps the 
Phaenomena and Prognostics'^ of Aratus. On assuming the manly 
gown he at once attached himself to Scaevola for the purpose of 
learning law, attending him not only in his private consultations, 
but also to the courts when he pleaded, and to the assembly when 
he harangued the people. His industry was untiring. As he 
tells us himself, he renounced dissipation, pleasure, exercise, even 
society ; his whole spare time was spent in reading, writing, and 
declaiming, besides daily attendance at the forum, where he 
drank in with eager zeal the fervid eloquence of the great speakers. 
Naturally keen to observe, he quickened his faculties by assiduous 
attention ; not a tone, not a gesture, not a turn of speech ever 

* The biographical details are to a great extent drawn from Forsyth's Life 
of Cicero. '^ Or 5ioo"7j/u,eto. 



160 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

escaped Mm ; all were noted down in his ready memory to be 
turned to good account when his own day should come. Mean- 
while he prepared himself by deeper studies for rising to oratorical 
eminence. He attended the subtle lectures of Philo the Academic, 
and practised the minute dialectic of the Stoics under Diodotus, 
and tested his command over both philosophy and disputation by 
declaiming in Greek before the rhetorician Molo. 

At the age of tAventy-five he thought himself qualified to appear 
before the world. The speech for Quintius,i delivered 81 b.c. is 
not his first, but it is one of his earliest. In it he appears as the 
opponent of Hortensius. At this time Sulla was all-powerful at 
Eome. He had crushed with pitiless ferocity the remnants of the 
Marian party; he had reinstated the senate in its privileges, 
abased the tribunate, checked the power of the knights, and still 
swayed public opinion by a rule of terror. In his tAventy-seventh 
year, Cicero, by defending S. Roscius Amerinus,^ expo.^ed himseK 
to the dictator's wrath. Roscius, whose accuser was Sulla's 
powerful freedman Chrysogonus, was, though innocent, in immi- 
nent danger of conviction, but Cicero's staunch courage and 
irrisistible eloquence procured his acquittal. The efiect of this 
speech was instantaneous ; the young aspirant was at once ranked 
among the great orators of the day. 

In this speech we see Cicero espousing the popular side. The 
change which afterwards took place in his political conduct may 
jjerhaps be explained by his strong hatred on the one hand for 
personal domination, and by his enthusiasm on the other for the 
great traditions of the past. Averse by nature to all extremes, 
and ever disposed towards the weaker cause, he became a vacillat- 
ing statesman, because his genius was hterary not political, and 
because (being a scrupulously conscientious man, and without 
the inheritance of a family political creed to guide him) he found 
it hard to judge on which side right lay. The three crises of his 
life, his defence of Roscius, his contest with Catiline, and his 
resistance to Antony, were precisely the three occasions when no 
such doubts were possible, and on all these the conduct of Cicero, 
as well as his genius, shines with its brightest lustre. . To the 
speech for Roscius, his first and therefore his boldest effort, he 
always looked back with justifiable pride, and drew from it 
perhaps in after life a spur to meet greater dangers, greater because 
experience enabled him to foresee them.^ 

About this time Cicero's health began to fail from too constant 
study and over severe exertions in pleading. The tremendous 

1 Pro Quintio, ^ Pro S. Boscio At->urino. ^ See De Off. ii. 14. 



THE IMPEACHMENT OF VERKES. 161 

calls on a Eoman orator's physique must have prevented any but 
robust men from attaining eminence. The place where he spoke, 
girt as it was with the proudest monuments of imperial dominion, 
the assembled multitudes, the magnitude of the political issues on 
which in reahty nearly every criminal trial turned, all these roused 
the spirit of the speaker to its utmost tension, and awoke a corres- 
ponding vehemence of action and voice. 

Cicero therefore retired to Athens, where he spent six months 
studying philosophy with Antiochus the Academic, and with Zeno 
and Phaedrus who were both Epicureans. His brother Quintus 
and his friend Atticus were fellow-students with him. He next 
travelled in Asia Minor, seeking the help and advice of all the 
celebrated rhetoricians he met, as Menippus of Stratonice, Diony- 
sius of Magnesia, Aeschylus of Cnidos, Xenocles of Adramyttium. 
At Ehodes he again placed himself under Molo, whose wise 
counsel checked the Asiatic exuberance which to his latest years 
Cicero could never quite discard ; and after an absence of over 
two years he returned home thoroughly restored in health, and 
steadily determined to win his place as the greatest orator of Eome 
(76 B.C.). Meanwhile Sulla had died, and Cicero no longer 
incurred danger by expressing his views. He soon after defended 
the great comedian Eoscius^ on a charge of fraud in a civil speech 
still extant, and apparently towards the end of the same year was 
married to Terentia, a lady of high birth, with whom he lived for 
upwards of thirty years. 

In 75 B.C. Cicero was elected quaestor, and obtained the pro- 
vince of Sicily under the Praetor Sextus Peducaeus. Wliile there 
he conciliated good will by his integrity and kindness, and on his 
departure was loaded with honours by the grateful provincials. 
But he saw the necessity of remaining in Eome for the future, if 
he wished to become known ; consequently he took a house near 
the forum, and applied himseK unremittingly to the calls of his 
profession. He was now placed on the list of senators, and in the 
year 70 appeared as a candidate for the aedileship. The only 
oration we know of during the intervening years is that for TuUius ^ 
(71 B.C.) ; but many cases of importance must have been pleaded 
by him, since in the preliminary speech by which he secured the 
conduct of the case against Yerres,^ he triumphantly brings himself 
forward as the only man whose tried capacity and unfailing success 
makes him a match for Hortensius, who is retained on the other 
side. This year is memorable for the impeachment of Verres, the 
only instance almost where Cicero acted as public prosecutor, his 

^ Pro Eoscio Comocdo. ^ Pro M. Tullio. ^ Divinatio in Caecilium. 

L 



162 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

kindly nature being apter to defend than to accuse ; but on this 
occasion he burned with righteous indignation, and spared no 
labour or expense to ransack Sicily for evidence of the infamous 
praetor's guilt. 

Cicero was tied to the Sicilians, whom he called his clients, by 
acts of mutual kindness, and he now stood forth to avenge them 
with a good will. The friends of Verres tried to procure a 
Praevaricatio, or sham accusation, conducted by a friend of the 
defendant, but Cicero stopped this by his brilliant and Avithering 
invective on Caecilius, the unlucky candidate for this dishonourable 
office. The judges, who were all senators, could not but award 
the prosecution to Cicero, who, determined to obtain a conviction, 
conducted it with the utmost despatch. Waiving his right to 
speak, and bringing on the witnesses contrary to custom at the 
outset of the trial, he produced evidence so crushing that Yerres 
absconded, and the splendid orations which remain^ had no 
occasion to be, and never were, delivered. It was Cicero's justifi- 
able boast that he obtained all the offices of state in the first year 
in which he could by law hold them. In 69 B.C. he was elected at 
the head of the poll as Curule Aedile, a post of no special dignity, 
something between that of a mayor and a commissioner of works, 
but admitting a liberal expenditure on the public shows, and so 
useful towards acquiring the popularity necessary for one who 
aspired to the consulship. To this year are to be referred the 
extant speeches for Fonteius ^ and Caecina,^ and perhaps the lost 
ones for Matridius * and Oppius.^ Cicero contrived without any 
great expenditure to make his sedileship a success. The people 
were well disposed to him, and regarded him as their most brilliant 
re23resentative. 

The next year (68 B.C.) is important for the historian as that in 
which begins Cicero's Correspondence — a mine of information 
more trustworthy than anything else in the whole range of an- 
tiquity, and of exquisite Latinity, and in style unsurpassed and 
unsurpassable. The wealth that had flowed in from various 
sources, such as bequests, presents from foreign potentates or 
grateful clients at home, loans probably from the same source, to 
which we must add his wife's considerable dowry, he proceeded to 
expend in erecting a viila at Tusculum. Such villas were the fairest 
ornaments of Italy, " ocelli Italiae" as Cicero calls them, and their 
splendour may be inferred from the descriptions of Yarro and 
Pliny. Cicero's, however, though it contained choice works of 

* In Yerretn. The titles of the separate speeches are De Praetura Urbana, 
De lurisclidion''- Siciliensi, Da Frumento, De Signis, De Su2)pliciis. 

2 p^-o Fonteio. ^ Pro Caecina. * Pro Matridio (lost). ® Pro Ovpio (lost). 



I 



THE MANILfAN LAW. 163 

art and maity rare books, could not challenge comparison -with 
those of great nobles such as Catulus, LucuUus, or Crassus, but it 
was tastefully laid out so as to resemble in miniature the Academy 
of Athens, where several of his happiest hours had been spent, 
and to which in thought he often returned. Later in life he 
purchased other country-seats at Antium, Asturia, Sinnessa, 
Arpinum, Formiae, Cumae, Puteoli, and Pompeii; but the Tus- 
culan was always his favourite. 

In the year 67 Cicero stood for the praetorship, the election to 
which was twice put off, owing to the disturbances connected with 
Gabinius' motion for giving the command of the Mediterranean to 
Pompey, and that of Otho for assigning separate seats in the 
theatre to the knights. But the third election ratified the results 
of the two previous ones, and brought in Cicero with a large 
majority as Praetor Urhanus over the heads of seven, some of 
them very distinguished, competitors. He entered on his office 
QQ B.C. and signahsed himseK by his high conduct as a judge; 
but this did not, however, prevent him from exercising his pro- 
fession as an advocate, for in this year he defended Fundanius ^ 
in a speech now lost, and Cluentius ^ (who was accused of poison- 
ing) in an extremely long and complicated argument, one of the 
most difficult, but from the light it throws on the depraved morals 
of the time one of the most important of all his speeches. 
Another oration belonging to this year, and the first political 
harangue which Cicero delivered, was that in favour of the JSIani- 
lian law,^ which conferred on Pompey the conduct of the war 
against Mithridates. The bill was highly popular ; Caesar openly 
favoured it, and Cicero had no difficulty in carrying the entire 
assembly with him. It is a singularly happy effort of his eloquence, 
and contains a noble panegjTic on Pompey, the more admirable 
because there was no personal motive behind it. At the expiration 
of his praetorian year he had the option of a province, which was 
a means of acquiring wealth eagerly coveted by the ambitious ; but 
Cicero felt the necessity of remaining at Eome too strongly to be 
tempted by such a bribe. " Out of sight, out of mind," was no- 
where so true as at Eome. If he remained away a year, who 
could tell whether his chance for the Consulship might not be 
irretrievably compromised % 

In the following year (65 B.C.) he announced himself as a can- 
didate for this, the great object of his ambition, and received from 
his brother some most valuable suggestions in the essay or letter 
known as De Petitione Considahis, This manual (for so it might 

1 Pro Fundanio (lost). ^ Pro A. Cluentio Hahito 

^ Pro lege Maidlia. 



164 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

be called) of electioneering tactics, gives a curious insight into tlie 
customs of the time, and in union with many shrewd and per- 
tinent remarks, contains independent testimony to the evil char- 
acters of Antony and Catiline. But Cicero relied more on his 
eloquence than on the arts of canvassing. It was at this juncture 
that he defended the ex-tribune Cornelius, ^ who had been accused 
of maiestas, with such surpassing skill as to draw forth from Quin- 
tiHan a special tribute of praise. This speech is unfortunately 
lost. His speech in the white gown,'^ of which a few fragments 
are preserved by Asconius, was delivered the following year, only 
a few days before the election, to support the senatorial measure 
for checking corrupt canvassing. When the comitia were held, 
Cicero was elected by a unanimous vote, a fact which reflects 
credit upon those who gave it. For the candidate to whom they 
did honour had no claims of birth, or wealth, or military glory ; 
he had never flattered them, never bribed them ; his sole title to 
their favour was his splendid genius, his unsullied character, and 
his defence of their rights whenever right was on their side. 
The only trial at which Cicero pleaded during this year was that 
of Q. Gellius,^ in which he was successful. 

The beginning of his consulship (63 B.C.) was signahsed by 
three great oratorical displays, viz. the speeches against the agra- 
rian law of EuUus* and the extempore speech delivered on behalf 
of Eoscius Otho. The populace on seeing Otho enter the theatre, 
rose in a body and greeted him with hisses : a tumult ensued ; 
Cicero was sent for ; he summoned the people into an adjoining 
temple, and rebuked them with such sparkling wit as to restore 
completely their good humour. It is to this triumph of eloquence 
that Viigil is thought to refer in the magnificent simile {Aen. i 148) : 

*' Ac veluti magno in populo cum saepe coorta est 
Seditio, saevitque animis ignoblle volgus ; 
lam que faces et saxa volant, furor arma nilnistrat; 
Tum pietate gravem ac meritis si forte virum quem. 
Aspexere silent arrectisque auribus adstant ; 
Ille regit dictis animos et pectora mulcet." 

The next speech, which still remains to us, is a defence of the 
senator Eabirius;^ that on behaK of Calpurnius Piso is lost.* 
But the efforts which make this year forever memorable are the 
four orations against Catiline.''' These were almost extemporaneous, 
and in their trenchant vigour and terrible mastery of invective are 
unsurpassed except by the second Phihppic. In the very heat of 

^ Pro C. Cornelio. * In toga Candida. ^ Fro. Q. Gellio (lost). 

4 De lege Agraria. » p^^ q^ MaUrio. « Fro Calpurnio Fisone (lost). 

^ In L. Catilinarru 



CICERO AND CLODIUS. 165 

the crisis, however, Cicero found time to defend his friend 
Muraena^ in a brilliant and jocose speech, which shows the mar- 
vellous versatility of the man. That warm Italian nature, open 
to every gust of feehng, over which impressions came and went 
like summer clouds, could turn at a moment's notice from the 
hand-to-hand grapple of a deadly duel to the lightest and most 
delicate rapier practice of the fencing school. 

As soon as Cicero retired from office (62 B.C.) he found enemies 
ready to accuse him. Metellus the Tribune declared that he had 
violated the Constitution. Cicero rephed to him in a spirited 
speech, which he alludes to under the name Oratio Metellina, but 
he felt himself on insecure ground. Catiline was indeed crushed, 
but the ramifications of the ; conspiracy extended far and wide. 
Autronius arid Sulla were implicated in it; the former Cicero 
refused to aid, the latter he defended in a speech which is lost 
to us. 2 The only other speech of this year is that on behalf of 
the poet Archias,^ who had been accused of usurping the rights 
of a Eoman citizen. In the following year (61 B.C.) occurred the 
scandal about Clodius. This profligate demagogue would have 
been acquitted on an oMhi, had it not been for Cicero's damaging 
evidence ; he nevertheless contrived to procure a final acquittal by 
the most abominable means, but determined to wreak his ven- 
geance by working Cicero's ruin. To this resolution the personal 
taunts of the great orator no doubt contributed. We have an 
account from Cicero's pen of the scenes that took place in the 
senate during the trial — the invectives poured forth by Clodius 
and the no less fiery retorts of his opponent. We must not imagine 
our orator's talent as always finding vent in the lofty strain which 
we are accustomed to associate with him. On the contrary, his 
attacks at times were pitched in another key, and he would fre- 
quently exchange sarcastic jests in a way that we should regard as 
incompatible with decency, and almost with self-respect. On one 
occasion, for instance, he had a skirmish of wit, which was vocifer- 
ously applauded by an admiring senate : " You have bought a 
house," says Clodius. (We quote from Forsyth.) " One would 
think," rejoins Cicero, "that you said I had bought a jury." "They 
did not believe you on your oath ! " exclaims Clodius. " Yes," 
retorted Cicero, "twenty-five of the jury did believe me, but 
thirty-one did not believe you, for they took care to get their 
money beforehand ! " These and similar pleasantries, however 
they may have tickled the ears of the senate, awoke in Clodius 
an implacable hatred, Avhich could only be satisfied with Cicero's 

Fro MwracTia. ^ Fro Comelio Sulla (lost). ' Pro Archia poeta. 



166 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

fall ; and the better to strike at him he made an attempt (un- 
successful at first, but carried out somewhat later) to be made a 
plebeian and elected tribune of the people (60 B.a). 

Meanwhile Cicero had returned to his profession, and defended 
Scipio ISTasica ; ^ he had also composed a history of his consulship 
in Greek, on which (to use his own expression) he had emptied all 
the scent-boxes of Iso crates, and touched it lightly with the brush 
of Aristotle ; moreover, he collected into one volume the speeches 
he had delivered as consul under the title of Consular Orations.'^ 
At this time the coalition known as the First Triumvirate was 
formed, and Cicero, disgusted at its unscrupulous conduct, left 
Eome for his Tusculan villa, where he meditated writing a work 
on universal geography. Soon, however, impatient of retirement, he 
returned to Eome, defended A. Themius ^ twice, and both times 
successfully, and afterwards, aided by Hortensius (with whose 
party he had now allied himself), L. Valerius Flaccus (59 B.C.).* 

But Clodius's vengeance was by this time imminent, and 
Pompey's assurances did not quiet Cicero's mind. He retired for 
some months to his Antian villa, and announced his intention of 
publishing a collection of anecdotes of contemporary statesmen, in 
the style of Theopompus, which would be, if we possessed it, an 
extremely valuable work. On his return to Eome (58 B.C.) he 
found the feeling strongly against him, and a bill of Clodius's was 
passed, interdicting him from fire and water, confiscating his pro- 
perty, and outlawing his person. The pusillanimity he shows 
in his exile exceeds even the measure of what we could have 
believed. It must be remembered that the love of country was a 
passion with the ancients to a degree now difficult to realise ; and 
exile from it, even for a time, was felt to be an intolerable eviL 
But Cicero's exile did not last long ; in August of the following 
year (57 B.C.) he was recalled with no dissentient voice but that 
of Clodius, and at once hastened to Eome, where he addressed 
the senate and people in terms of extravagant comphment. 
These are the fine speeches "on his return,"^ in the first of which 
he thanks the senate, and in the second the people ; in the third he 
addresses the pontiffs, trying to persuade them that he has a right 
to reclaim the site of his house, ^ in the fourth'^ which was dehvered 
early the next year, he rings the changes on the same subject. 

The next year (56 B.C.) is signalised by several important 
speeches. Whatever we may think of his political conduct during 

^ Pro Scip. Nasica. ^ Orationes Consulares. 

* Pro A. Themio (lost), ■* Pro Flacco. 

^ Orationes post reditum. They are ad Senatum, and ad Populum, 

* De domo sua. ' De Icaruspicum responsis. 



THE SPEECH FOR MILO. 167 

this trying period, his professional activity was most remarkable. 
He defended L. Bestia^ (who was accused of electoral corruption 
when candidate for the praetorship) but unsuccessfully ; and also P. 
Sextius,2 Qji a charge of bribery and illegal violence, in which he was 
supported by Hortensius. Soon after we find him in the country 
in correspondence with Lucceius, on the subject of the history of his 
consulship ; but he soon returned to Rome and before the year 
ended dehvered his fine speech on the consular provinces,^ in 
which he opposed the curtailment of Caesar's command in Gaul ; 
and also that on behalf of CoeHus,* a lively and elegant oration 
which has been quoted to prove that Cicero was indifferent to 
purity of morals, because he palliates as an advocate and a friend 
the youthful indiscretions of his client. 

In 55 B.C. he pleaded the cause of Caninius Gallus,^ in a suc- 
cessful speech now lost, and attacked the ex-consul Piso^ (who 
had long roused his resentment) in terms of the most unmeasured 
and unworthy invective. Towards the close of the year he com- 
pleted his great treatise, De Oratore, the most finished and fault- 
less of aU his compositions; and so active was his mind at 
this epoch, that he ofiered to write a treatise on Britain, if 
Quintus, who had been there with Caesar, would furnish him 
with the materials. His own poems, de Consulatu and de Tem- 
porihus suis had been completed before this, and, as we learn from 
the letters, were highly approved by Caesar. Next year (54 B.C.) 
he defended Plancius''' and Scaurus,^ the former of which orations 
is stni extant; and later on, Eabirius Postumus,^ who was 
accused, probably with justice, of extortion. This year had wit- 
nessed another change ia Cicero's pohcy ; he had transferred his 
allegiance from Pompey to Caesar. In 52 B.C. occurred the cele- 
brated trial of Milo for the murder of Clodius, in which Cicero, 
who appeared for the defendant, was hampered by the presence of 
Pompey's armed retainers, and made but a poor speech; the 
magnificent and exhaustive oratorical display that we possess^® 
having been written after Milo's condemnation and sent to him in 
his exile at Marseilles, where he received it with sarcastic praise. 
At the close of this year Cicero was appointed to the government 
of the province of Cilicia, where he conducted himself Mdth an 
integrity and moderation little known to Eoman pro-consuls, and 
returned in 50 B.C. scarcely richer than he had set out. 

During the following years Cicero played a subordinate part. 

^ Pro L. Bestia, ^ Pro Sextio. 3 De Provinciis Consularihus. 

* Pro Coelio. ' Pro Can. Gallo (lost). ® In Pisonen. 

' Pro Plancio. ^ Pro Scauro (lost). * Pro C. Eahirio Postumo (lost). 
10 p^Q j> jinjiio Milone, 



168 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

rTn the great convulsions tliat were shaking the state men of a 
different sort were required ; men who possessed the first requisite 
for tlie statesman, the one thing that Cicero lacked, firmness. 
Had Cicero heen as firm as he was clear-sighted, he might have 
headed the statesmanship of Rome. But whi''e he saw the drift 
of affairs he had not courage to act upon his insight ; he allowed 
liimself to be made the tool, now of Pompey, now of Caesar, till 
both were tired of him. " I wish," said Pompey, when Cicero 
joined him in Epirus, " that Cicero would go over to the other 
side ; perhaps he would then be afraid of us." The only speeches we 
possess of this period were dehvered subsequently to the victorious 
entry of Caesar, and exhibit a prudent but most unworthy adulation. 
That for Marcellusi (46 B.C.) was uttered in the senate, and from its 
gross flattery of the dictator was long supposed to be spurious ; the 
others on behaK of Ligarius^ and King Deiotarus^ are in a scarcely 
more elevated strain. Cicero was neither satisfied with himself nor 
with the world; he remained for the most time in retirement, and 
devoted his energies to other literary labours. But his absence had 
proved his value. No sooner is Caesar dead than he appears once 
more at the head of the state, and surpasses all his former efforts 
in the final contest waged with the brutal and unscrupulous 
Antony. On the history of this eventful period we shall not 
touch, but merely notice the fourteen glorious orations called 
Philijppicae^ (after those of Demosthenes), with which as by a 
bright halo he encircled the closing period of his life. 

The first was delivered in the senate (2d September, 44 B.C.) 
and in it Cicero, who had been persuaded by Brutus, most fortu- 
nately for his glory, to return to Eome, excuses his long absence 
from affairs, and complains with great boldness of Antony's 
threatening attitude. This roused the anger of his opponent, who 
delivered a fierce invective upon Cicero, to which the latter replied 
by that tremendous outburst of mingled imprecation, abuse, self- 
justification, and exalted patriotism, which is known as the 
Second Philippic. This was not published until Antony had left 
Eome ; but it is composed as if it had been delivered immediately 
after the speech which provoked it. JS'ever in all the history of 
eloquence has a traitor been so terribly denounced, an enemy so 
mercilessly scourged. It has always been considered by critics as 
Cicero's crowning masterpiece. The other Philippics, some of 
which were uttered in the senate, while others were extempore 
harangues before the people, were delivered in quick succession 
between December 44 b.c. and April 43 b.o. They cost the 

^ Pro Marcello. ^ Pro Q. Ligario. 

^ Pro Rege Deiotaro. * Orationes PMKppicae in M. Antonium xiv. 



CRITICISM or HIS ORATOEY. 169 

orator his life. When Antony and Octavius entered Eome 
together, and each sacrificed his friends to the other's bloodthirsty 
vengeance, Cicero was surrendered by Octavius to Antony's 
minions. He was apprised of the danger, and for a while thought 
of escaping, but nobler thoughts prevailed, and he determined to 
meet his fate, and seal by death a life devoted to his country. 
The end is well-known ; on the 7th of December he was mur- 
dered by Popillius Laenas, a man whom he had often befriended, 
and his head and hands sent to Antony, who nailed them to the 
rostra, in mockery of the immortal eloquence of which that spot 
had so often been the scene, and which was now for ever hushed, 
leaving to posterity the bitter reflection that Freedom had perished, 
and with her Eloquence, her legitimate and noblest child. 

The works of this many-sided genius may be classed under 
three chief divisions, on each of which we shall offer a few critical 
remarks ; his Orations, his Philosophical and Ehetorical Treatises, 
and his Correspondence. 

Cicero was above all things an Orator. To be the greatest 
orator of Rome, the equal of Demosthenes, was his supreme 
desu'e, and to it all other studies were made subservient. Poetry, 
history, law, philosophy, were regarded by him only as so many 
qualifications without which an orator could not be perfect. He 
could not conceive a great orator except as a great man, nor a good 
orator except as a good man. The integrity of his public conduct, 
the purity of his private life, wonderful if contrasted with the 
standard of those around him, arose in no small degree from the 
proud consciousness that he who was at the head of Eoman 
eloquence must lead in all respects a higher life than other men. 
The cherished theory of Quintilian, that a perfect orator would be 
the best man that earth could produce, is really but a restatement 
of Cicero's firm belief. His highest faculties, his entire nature, 
conspired to develop the powers of eloquence that glowed within 
him ; and though to us his philosophical treatises or his letters may 
be more refreshing or full of richer interest than his speeches, yet 
it is by these that his great fame has been mainly acquired, and it 
is these ^vliich beyond comparison best display his genius. 

Of the eighty or thereabouts which he is known to have com- 
posed, fifty-nine are in whole or in part preserved. They enable 
us to form a complete estimate of his excellences and defects, for 
they belong to almost every department of eloquence. Some, as 
we have seen, are deliberative, others judicial, others descriptive, 
others personal ; and while in the two latter classes his talents 
are nobly conspicuous, the first is as iU-adapted as the second is 
pre-eminently suitable to his special gifts. As pleader for an 



170 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

accused person, Cicero cannot, we may say could not, be surpassed. 
'It was this exercise of his talent that gave him the deepest plea- 
sure, and sometimes, as he says with noble pride, seemed to lift 
him almost above the privileges of humanity; for to help the 
weak, to save the accused from death, is a work worthy of the 
gods. In invective, nothwithstanding his splendid anger against 
Catiline, Antony, and Piso, he does not appear at his happiest ; 
and the reason is not far to seek. It has often been laid to his 
reproach that he corresponded and even held friendly intercourse 
vvith men whom he holds up at another time to the execration of 
mankind. Catiline, Antony, Clodius, not to mention other less 
notorious criminals, had all had friendly relations with him. 
And even at the very time of his most indignant speeches, we 
know from his confidential correspondence that he often meditated 
advances towards the men concerned, which showed at least an 
indulgent attitude. The truth is, that his character was all sym- 
pathy. He had so many points of contact with every human 
being, he was so full of human feeling, that he could in a moment 
put himself into each man's position and draw out whatever plea 
or excuse his conduct admitted. It was not his nature to feel 
anger long ; it evaporates almost in the speaking ; he soon returns 
to the kind and charitable construction which, except for reasons 
of argument, he was always the foremost to assume. No man 
who lived was ever more forgiving. And it is this, and not moral 
blindness or indifference, which explains the glaring inconsistencies 
of his relations to others. It mil follow from this that he was 
pre-eminently fitted for the oratory of panegyric. And beyond 
doubt he has succeeded in this difficult department better than 
any other orator, ancient or modern. Whether he praises his 
country, its religion, its laws, its citizens, its senate, or its in- 
dividual magistrates, he does it with enthusiasm, a splendour, a 
geniality, and an inconceivable richness of felicitous expression 
which make us love the man as much as we admire his genius. ^ 

And here we do not find that apparent want of conviction that 
so painfully jars on the impression of reality which is the first 
testimony to an orator's worth. When he praises, he praises with 
all his heart. When he raises the strain of moral indignation we 
can almost always beneath the orator's enthusiasm detect the 
rhetorician's art. We shall have occasion to notice in a future page 
the distressing loss of power which at a later period this affecta- 
tion of moral sentiment involved. In Cicero it does not intrude 
upon the surface, it is only remotely present in the background, 

1 Such are the speeches for the ManiHan law, for Marcellus, Archias, and 
Bome of tlie later Philippics in praise of Octavius an^. Servius Sulpicius. 



' CRITICISM OF HIS ORATORY. 171 

and to tlie Eomans themselves no doubt appeared an excellence 
rather than a defect. Nevertheless, if we compare Cicero with 
Demosthenes in this respect, we shall at once acknowledge the 
decisive superiority of the latter, not only in his never pretending 
to take a lofty tone when he is simply abusing an enemy, but in 
his immeasurably deeper earnestness when a question of patriotism 
or moral right calls out his highest powers. Cicero has always 
an array of common-places ready for any subject; every case 
which he argues can be shown to involve such issues as the belief 
in a divine providence, the loyalty to patriotic tradition, the 
mnintenance of the constitution, or the sanctity of family life; 
and on these well-worn themes he dilates with a magnificent pro- 
digality of pathetic ornament which, while it lends splendour tc 
his style, contrasts most unfavourably with the curt, business-like, 
and strictly relevant arguments of Demosthenes. 

For deliberative eloquence it has been abeady said that Cicero 
was not well fitted, since on great questions of state it is not so 
much the orator's fire or even his arguments that move as the 
authority which attaches to his person. And in this lofty source 
of influence Cicero was deficient. It was not by his fiery in- 
vective, or his impressive pictures of the peril of the state, that 
the senate was persuaded to condemn the Catilinarian conspirators 
to death without a trial ; it was the stern authoritative accents of 
Cato that settled their wavering resolution. Cicero was always 
applauded ; men like Crassus, Pompey, or Caesar, were followed. 

Even in his own special department of judicial eloquence 
Cicero's mind was not able to cope with the great principles of 
law. Such fundamental questions as " Whether law may be set 
aside for the purpose of saving the state 1" "How far an illegal 
action which has had good results is justifiable 1 " questions which 
concern the statesman and philosopher as much as the jurist, he 
meets with a superficial and merely popular treatment. Without 
any firm basis of opinion, either philosophical hke Cato's, personal 
like Caesar's, or traditional like that of the senate, he was com- 
pelled to judge questions by the results which he could foresee at 
the moment, and by the floating popular standard to which, as an 
advocate, he had naturally turned. 

But while denying to Cicero the highest legal attributes, we 
must not forget that the jury before whom he pleaded demanded 
eloquence rather than profound knowledge. The orations to 
which they were accustomed were laid out according to a fixed 
rhetorical plan, the plan proposed in the treatise to Herennius and 
in Cicero's own youthful work, the De Inventione. There is th? 
introduction, containing the preliminarv statement of the case, an^ 



172 HISTOEY OF ROMAN LITEEATU'RE. 

tlie ethical proof ; the body of the speech, the argument, and the 

peroration addressing itself to the passions of the judge. No 
better instance is found of this systematic treatment than the 
speech for Milo,^ declared by native critics to be faultless, and of 
which, for the sake of illustration, we give a succinct analysis. It 
must be remembered that he has a bad case. He commences 
with a few introductory remarks intended to recommend him- 
self and conciliate his judges, dilating on the special causes 
which make his address less confident than usual, and claiming 
their indulgence for it. He then answers certain d prmri ob- 
jections likely to be offered, as that no homicide deserves 
to live, which is refuted by the legal permission to kill in self- 
defence; that Milo's act had already been condemned by the 
senate, which is refuted by the fact that a majority of senators 
praised it ; that Pompey had decided the question of law, which 
is refuted by his permitting a trial at all, which he would not 
have done unless a legal defence could be entertained. The 
objections answered, and a special comphment having been judi- 
ciously paid to the presiding judge, he proceeds to the Expositio, 
or statement of facts. In this particular case they were by no 
means advantageous ; consequently, Cicero shows his art by cloak- 
ing them in an involved narration which, while apparently 
plausible, is in reality based on a suppression of truth. Having 
rapidly disposed of these, "he proceeds to sketch the line of defence 
with its several successive arguments. He declares himself about 
to prove that so far from being the aggressor, Milo did but defend 
himself against a plot laid by Clodius. As this was quite a new 
light to the jury, their minds must be prepared for it by persuasive 
grounds of probability. He first shows that Clodius had strong 
reasons for wishing to be rid of Milo, Milo on the contrary had 
still stronger ones for not wishing to be rid of Clodius ; he next 
shows that Clodius's life and character had been such as to make 
assassination a natural act for him to commit, while Milo on the 
contrary had always refused to commit violence, though he had 
many times had the power to do so ; next, that time and place 
and circumstances favoured Clodius, but were altogether against 
Milo, some plausible objections notwithstanding, which he states 
with consummate art, and then proceeds to demolish ; next, that 
the indifference of the accused to the crimes laid to his charge is 

^ It will be remembered that Milo and Clodius had encountered each 
other on the Appian Road, and in the scuffle that ensued, the latter had 
been killed. Cicero tries to prove that Milo was not the aggressor, but that, 
even if he had been, he would have been justified, since Clodius was a per- 
nicious citizen dangerous to the state. 



I 



CRITICISM OF HIS ORATORY. 173 

surely incompatible with, guilt ; and lastly, that even if his 
innocence could not be proved, as it most certainly can, stiU he 
might take credit to himself for having done the state a service by 
destroying one of its worst enemies. And then, in the peroration 
that follows, he rouses the passions of the judges by a glowing 
picture of Clodius's guilt, balanced by an equally glowing one of 
Milo's virtues ; he shows that Providence itseK had intervened to 
bring the sinful career of Clodius to an end, and sanctified Milo 
by making him its instrument, and he concludes with a brilliant 
avowal of love and admiration for his chent, for whose loss, if he 
is to be condemned, nothing can ever console him. But the judges 
will not condemn him ; they will follow in the path pointed out 
by heaven, and restore a faithful citizen to that country which longs 
for his service. — Had Cicero but had the courage to deliver this 
speech, there can be scarcely any doubt what the result would have 
been. Neither senate, nor judges, nor people, ever could resist, or 
eyev tried to resist, the impassioned eloquence of their great orator. 
In the above speech the argumentative and ethical portions are 
highly elaborated, but the descriptive and personal are, compara- 
tively speaking, absent. Yet in nothing is Cicero more conspicu- 
ous than in his clear and lifelike descriptions. His portraits are 
photographic. Whether he describes the money-loving Chaerea 
with his shaven eye-brows and head reeking with cunning 
and malice ;^ or the insolent Yerres, lolling on a litter with eight 
bearers, like an Asiatic despot, stretched on a bed of rose-leaves ;2 
or Yatinius, darting forward to speak, his eyes starting from his 
head, his neck swollen, and his muscles rigid ;^ or the Gaulish and 
Greek witnesses, of whom the former swagger erect across the 
forum, ^ the latter chatter and gesticulate without ever looking up ;^ 
we see in each case the master's powerful hand. Other descriptions 
are longer and more ambitious ; the confusion of the Catilinarian 
conspirators after detection ; ^ the character of Catiline ; ^ the 
debauchery of Antony in Yarro's villa ;^ the scourging and cruci- 
fixion of Gavius;^ the grim old Censor Appius frowning on 
Clodia his degenerate descendentj^^ the tissue of monstrous crime 
which fills page after page of the Cluentius.^^ These are pictures 
for aU time ; they combine the poet's eye with the stern spirit of 
the moralist. His power of description is equalled by the readi- 
ness of his wit. Eaillery, banter, sarcasm, jest, irony light and 
grave, the whole artillery of wit, is always at his command ; and 
though to our taste many of liis jokes are coarse, others dull, and 

1 Rose. Com. 7. » in Verr. ii. v. 11. ^ in Vatin. 2. * Pro Font. 11. 
» Pro Rabir. Post. 13. « Cat. ill. 3. "^ Pro Coel. 3. » pi^ii, ^ 41, 
» In Verr. v. 65. ^^ Pro Coel. 6. " Pro Cluent. pass. 



174 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

others unfair or in bad taste, yet the Eomans were never tired of 

extolling them. These are varied with digressions of a graver cast : 
pliilosophical sentiments, patriotic allusions, gentle moralisings, and 
rare gems of ancient legend, succeed each other in the kaleidoscope 
of his shifting fancy, whose combinations may appear irregular, but 
are generally bound together by chains of the most dehcate art. 

His chief faults are exaggeration, vanity, and an inordinate love 
of words. The former is at once a conscious rhetorical artifice, 
and an unconscious effect of his vehement and excitable tempera- 
ment. It probably did not deceive his hearers any more than it 
deceives us. His vanity is more deplorable ; and the only pallia- 
tion it admits is the fact that it is a defect which rarely goes with 
a bad heart. Had Cicero been less vain, he might have been 
more ambitious ; as it was, his ridiculous self-conceit injured no one 
but himself. His wordiness is of all his faults the most seductive 
and the most conspicuous, and procured for him even in his life- 
time the "epithet of Asiatic. He himself was sensible that his 
periods were overloaded. As has been well said, he leaves nothing 
to the imagination. 1 Later critics strongly censured him, and 
both Tacitus and Quintilian think it necessary to assert his pre- 
eminence. His wealth of illustration chokes the idea, as creepers 
choke the forest tree ; both are beautiful and bright with flowers, 
but both injure what they adorn. 

Nevertheless, if we are to judge his oratory by its effect on those 
for whom it was intended, and to whom it was addressed ; as the 
vehement, gorgeous, impassioned utterance of an Italian speaking 
to Italians his countrymen, whom he knew, whom he charmed, 
whom he mastered ; we shall not be able to refuse him a place as 
Dqual to the greatest of those whose eloquence has swayed the 
destinies of the world. 

We now turn to consider Cicero as a Philosopher, in which 
character he was allowed to be the greatest teacher that Eome ever 
had, and has descended through the Middle Ages to our own time 
with his authority, indeed, shaken, but his popularity scarcely 
diminished. We must first observe that philosophy formed no 
part of his inner and real life. It was only when inactivity in 
public affairs was forced upon him that he devoted himself to its 
pursuit. During the agitation of the first triumvirate, he composed 
the De Repithlica and De Legihus^ and during Caesar's dictatorship 
and the consulship of Antony, he matured the great works of his 
old age. But the moment he was able to return with honour to 
his post, he threw aside philosophy, and devoted himself to politics, 
thus clearly proving that he regarded it as a solace for leisure or a 
1 Forsyth ; p. 544. 



HIS PHILOSOPHY. 175 

refuge from misfortune, rather than as the serious business of life. 
The system that would alone be suitable to such a character would 
be a sober scepticism, for scepticism in thought corresponds exactly 
to vacillation in conduct. But though liis mind inclined to scep- 
ticism, he had aspirations far higher than his intellect or his 
conduct could attain ; in his noblest moments he half rises to the 
grand Stoic ideal of a self-sufficient and all-wise virtue. Eut he 
cannot maintain himself at that height, and in general he takes 
the view of the Academy that all truth is but a question of more 
or less probability. 

To understand the philosophy of Cicero, it is necessary to 
remember both his own mental training, and the condition of 
those for whom he wrote. He himself regarded philosophy as 
food for eloquence, as one of the chief ingredients of a perfect 
orator. And his own mind, which by nature and practice had 
been cast in the oratorical mould, naturally leaned to that system 
which best admitted of presenting truth under the form of two 
competing rhetorical demonstrations. His readers, too, would be 
most attracted by this form of truth. He did not write for the 
original thinkers, the Catos, the Yarros, and the Scaevolas ;^ he 
wrote for the great mass of intelligent men, men of the world, 
whom he wished to interest in the lofty problems of which philo- 
sophy treats. He therefore above all things strove to make philo- 
sophy eloquent. He read for this purpose Plato, Aristotle, and 
almost all the great masters who ruled the schools in his day ; but 
being on a level with his age and not above it, he naturally turned 
rather to the thinkers nearest his o^\m time, whose clearer treat- 
ment also made them most easily imderstood. These were chiefly 
Epicureans, Stoics, and Academicians; and from the different 
'placita of these schools he selected such ^dews as harmonised 
with his own prepossessions, but neither chained himself down to 
any vspecial doctrine, nor endeavoured to force any doctrine of his 
OAvn upon others. In some of his more popular works, as those 
on political science and on moral duties,^ he does not employ any 
strictness of method ; but in his more systematic treatises he both 
recognises and strives to attain a regular process of investigation. 
We see this in the Topica, the De Finihus, and the Tusculanae 
Dispntationes, in all of which he was greatly assisted by the 
Academic point of view which strove to reconcile philosophy with 
the dictates of common sense. A purely speculative ideal such a8 

1 He himself quotes with approval the sentiment of Lucilius : 

nee doctissimis; 
Manium Persium haec legere nolo; lunium Congum volo. 

2 De EepuUica, De Legibus and De Officiis. 



176 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

that of Aristotle or Plato had already ceased to be propounded 
even hj the Greek systems ; and Eoman philosophy carried to a 
much more thorough development the practical tendency of the 
later Greek schools. In the Hortensius, a work unfortunately 
lost, which he intended to be the introduction to his great philo- 
sophical course, he removed the current objections to the study, 
and showed philosophy to be the only comforter in affliction and 
the true guide of life. The pursuit of virtue, therefore, being the 
proper end of wisdom, such speculations only should be pursued as 
are Avithin the sphere of human knowledge. Nevertheless he is 
inconsistent with his own programme, for he extends his investiga- 
tions far beyond the limits of ethics into the loftiest problems 
which can exercise the human mind. Carried away by the 
enthusiasm which he has caught from the great Greek sages, he 
asserts in one place^ that the search for divine truth is preferable 
even to the duties of practical life ; but that is an isolated state- 
ment. His strong Eoman instinct calls him back to recognise the 
paramount claims of daily life ; and he is nowhere more himself 
than when he declares that every one would leave philosophy to 
take care of herself at the first summons of duty.^ This subordi- 
nation of the theoretical to the practical led him to confuse in a 
rhetorical presentation the several parts of philosophy, and it seeks 
and finds its justification to a great extent in the endless disputes 
in which in every department of thought the three chief schools 
were involved. Physics (as the term was understood in his day) 
seemed to him the most mysterious and doubtful portion of the 
whole. A knowledge of the body and its properties is difficult 
enough ; how much more unattainable is a knowledge of such 
entities as the Deity and the soul 1 Those who pronounce abso- 
lutely on points like these involve themselves in the most inex- 
tricable contradictions. While they declare as certainties things 
that obviously differ in the general credence they meet with, they 
forget that certainty does not admit of degrees, whereas probability 
does. How much more reasonable therefore to regard such questions 
as coming within the sphere of the probable, and varying between 
the highest and the lowest degrees of probability. ^ 

In his moral theory Cicero shows greater decision. He is 
unwavering in his repudiation of the Epicurean view that virtue 
and pleasure are one,* and generally adheres to that of the other 
schools, who here agree in declaring that virtue consists in 
following nature. But here occurs the difficulty as to what 
place is to be assigned to external goods. At one time he inclines 

1 K D. ii. 1, fin. ^ pg off. i. 43. » See Acad. Post. ii. 41. 

4 De Off. i. 2. fi De fin. ii. 12. 



HIS PHILOSOPHY. 177 

to the lofty view of the Stoic that virtue is in itseK sufficient for 
happiness; at another, struck hy its inapphcability to practical 
life, he thinks this less true than the Peripatetic theory, which 
tcikes account of external circumstances, and though considering 
them as inappreciable when M^eighed in the balance against virtue, 
nevertheless admits that within certain Hmits they are necessary 
to a complete life. Thus it appears that both in physics and 
morals he doubted the reahty of the great abstract conceptions of 
reason, and came back to the presentations of sense as at all 
events the most indisputably probable. This would lead us to 
infer that he rested upon the senses as the ultimate criterion of 
truth. Eut if he adopts them as a criterion at all, he does so with 
great reservations. He allows the senses indeed the power of 
judging betwen sweet and bitter, near and distant, and the like, 
but he never allows them to determine what is good and what is 
evil.i And similarly he allows the intellect the power of judg- 
ment on genera and species, but he does not deny that it some- 
times spins out problems which it is wholly unable to solve. ^ 
Since therefore neither the senses nor the intellect are capable of 
supplying an infallible criterion, we must reject the Stoic doctrine 
that there are certain sensations so forcible as to produce an irre- 
sistible conviction of their truth. For these philosophers ascribe 
the full possession of this conviction to the sage alone, and he is 
not, nor can he be, one of the generality of mankiiid. Hence 
Cicero, who writes for these, gives his opinion that there are 
certain sensuous impressions in which from their permanence and 
force a man may safely trust, though he cannot assert them to be 
absolutely true.^ This liberal and popular doctrine he is aware 
will be undermined by the absolute sceptism of the New Academy;* 
but he is willing to risk this, and to put his view forward as the 
best possible approximation to truth. 

With these ultimate principles Cicero, in his De Noiura Deorum^ 
approaches the questions of the existence of God and of the human 
sold. The bias of his own nobler nature led him to hold fast 
these two vital truths, but he is fully aware that in attempting to 
prove them the Stoics have used arguments which are not convinc- 
ing. In the Tusculan disputations^ he acknowledges the necessity 

' De Fin. ii. 12. 

2 E.g. the sophisms of the Liar, the Sorites, and those on Motion. 

3 Ac. Post. 20. 

^ De Leg. i. 13 fin. Pertnrhatricem autem harum omnium rerum Aca- 
demian hanc ab Arcesila et Carneade recentem exoremus ut sileat. Nam si 
invascrit in haec, quae satis scite nobis instruota et composita videntur, 
nimias cdet ruinas. Quam quidera ego placare cupio, submovere non audeo, 

5 i. 28. 

M 



178 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

of assuming one supreme Creator or Ruler of all tMngs, endued 
mth eternal motion in himself ; and lie connects this view with 
the affinity which he everywhere assumes to subsist between the 
human and divine spirit. "With regard to the essence of the 
human soul he has no clear views; but he strenuously asserts its 
existence and phenomenal manifestation analogous to those of the 
Deity, and is disposed to ascribe to it immortality also.^ Free 
Will he considers to be a truth of pecuhar importance, probably 
from the practical consideration that on it responsibility and, 
therefore, morality itself ultimately rest. 

From this brief abstract it will be seen that Cicero's speculative 
beliefs were to a great extent determined by his moral convictions, 
and by his strong persuasion of the dignity of human nature. 
This leads him to combat with vigour, and satirise with merciless 
wit, the Epicurean theory of life ; and while his strong common 
sense forbids him to accept the Stoic doctrine in all its defiant 
harshness, he strengthens the Peripatetic view, to which he on the 
whole leans, by introducing elements drawn from it. The pecuhar 
combination which he thus strives to form takes its colour from 
his own character and from the terms of his native language. Tho 
Greeks declare that the beautiful {to KaXbv) is good ; Cicero declarej 
that the honourable (honestum) alone is good. Where, therefore, 
the Greeks had spoken of to KaXbv, and we should speak of moral 
good, Cicero speaks of honestum, and founds precisely similar argu- 
ments upon it. This conception implies, besides self-regarding 
rectitude, the praise of others and the rewards of glory, and hence 
is eminently suited to the pubhc-spirited men for whom he wrote. 
To it is opposed the base (turpe), that disgraceful evil which all 
good men would avoid. But as his whole moral theory is built 
on observation as much as on reading or reflection, he never 
stretches a rule too tight ; he makes allowance for overpowering 
circumstances, for the temper and bent of the individual. Apphc- 
>able to all who are engaged in an honourable career with the 
stimulus of success before them, his ethics were, especially suited 
to the noble families of Eome to whom the approval of their con- 
science was indeed a necessity of happiness, but the approval of 
those whom they respected was at least equally so. 

The list of his philosophical works is interesting and may well 
be given here. The Paradoxa (written 46 b.c.),^ explains certain 

^ Tasc. i, 12, a very celebrated and beautiful passage. 

2 The Paradoxes are — (1) on jx6vov rh KuXhv u.yaBov, (2) .'fri avrdpKrjsTjaper^ 
irphs evdaLfj.oi'iav, (3) ort 5fcra to, afxapT-nixaTa Koi ra ifa.Top9d^/j.aTa, (4) on iras 
&(ppwv ixaiuerai. We remember the treatment of this in Horace (S. ii. 3), (5) 
on fxovos 6 ffO<pos iX^vdephs koI nas 'd<pp<t)v dovKos, (6) on fioi'os 6 aocphs 
irXouaios 



i 



LIST OF HIS PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS. 179 

paradoxes of the Stoics. The Consolatio (45 b.c.) was written 
soon after the death of his daughter Tullia, whom he tenderly- 
loved. It is lost ivith the exception of a few fragments. The 
same fate has befallen the Hortendus, which would have been an 
extremely interesting treatise. The Definihus honorum et malorum, 
in five books, was composed in 45 b.c. In the first part M. Manhus 
Torquatus expounds the Epicurean views, which Cicero confutes 
(books i. ii.) ; in the second, Cato acts as champion of the Stoics, 
who are shown by Cicero to be by no means so exclusive as they 
profess (books iii. iv.) ; in the third and last Piso explains the 
theories of the Academy and the Lyceum. The Academica is 
divided into two editions ; the first, called Lucullus, is still extant ; 
the second, dedicated to Varro, exists in a considerable portion. 
The Tusculan Disputations^ Tiraaeus (now lost), and the De 
Natura Deorum, were all composed in the same year (45 B.C.). 
The latter is in the form of a dialogue between Yelleius the Epicu- 
rean, Balbus the Stoic, and Cotta the Academic, which is supposed 
to have been held in 77 B.C. The following year were produced 
Laelius or De Amicitia, De Divinatione, an important essay, De 
Fato, Cato Major or De Senedute, De Gloria (now lost), De 
Officiis, an excellent moral treatise addressed to his son, and De 
ViHutibus, which with the Oeconomics and Protagoras (transla- 
tions from the Greek), and the De Auguriis (51 B.C. ?) complete 
the hst of his strictly philosophical works. Political science is 
treated by him in the De Republica, of which the first two books 
remain in a tolerably complete state, the other four only in frag- 
ments,^ and in the De Legihus, of which three books only remain. 
The former was commenced in the year 54 B.C. but not pubhshed 
until two years later, at which time probably the latter treatise was 
written, but apparently never published. While in these works 
the form of dialogue is borrowed from the Greek, the argument 
is strongly coloured by his patriotic sympathies. He proves that 
the Eoman polity, which fuses in a happy combination the three 
elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, is the best 
suited for organic development and external dominion; and he 
treats many constitutional and legal questions with eloquence and 
insight. Our loss of the complete text of these books is to be 
deplored rather on account of the interesting information and 
numerous allusions they contained, than from their value as an 
exposition of the principles of law or government. The style is 
highly elaborated, and its even flow is broken by beautiful quota- 
tions from the old poets, especially the Annals of Ennius. 

1 A well-known fragment of the sixth book, the Somnium Scipionis, is pre- 
served in Macrobius. 



k 



180 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

. The rhetorical works of Cicero are both numerous and impor- 
tant. A practical science, of which the principles were of a nature 
intelligible to all, and needed only a clear exposition and the 
authority of personal experience, was, of all literary subjects, the 
best suited to bring out the rich qualities of Cicero's mind. Ac- 
cordingly we find that even in his early manhood he attempted to 
propound a theory of oratory in the unfinished work De Inventione^ 
or Rhetorica, as it is sometimes called. This was compiled partly 
from the Greek authorities, partly from the treatise Ad Herennium, 
which we have noticed under the last period. But he himself was 
quite conscious of its deficiencies, and alludes to it more than once 
as an unripe and youthful work. The fruits of his mature judg- 
ment were preserved in the De Oratore, a dialogue between some 
of the great orators of former days, in three books, written 55 b.c. 
The chief speakers are Crassus and Antonius, and we infer from 
Cicero's identifying himself with the former's views that he 
regarded him on the whole as the higher orator. The next work 
in the series is the invaluable Brutus sive de clans Oratorihus, a 
vast mine of information on the history of the Eoman bar, and the 
progress of oratorical excellence. The scene is laid in the Tusculan 
villa, where Cicero meets some of his younger friends shortly after 
the death of Hortensius. In his criticism of orators, past and 
present, he pays a touching tribute to the character and splendid 
talents of his late rival and at the same time intimate friend, and 
laments, what he foresaw too well, the speedy downfall of Roman 
eloquence.^ All these works of his later years are tinged with a 
deep sadness which lends a special charm to their graceful periods ; 
his political despondency drove him to seek solace m literary 
thought, but he could not so far lose himself even among his 
beloved worthies of the past as to throw off the cloud of gloom 
that softened but did not obscure his genius. The Orator ad M. 
Bridum is intended to give us his ideal of what a perfect orator 
should be ; its treatment is brilliant but imperfect. The Partiti- 
ones Oratoriaey or Catechism of the Art of Oratory, in questions 
and answers, belongs to the educational sphere; and, after the 
example of Cato's books, is addressed to his son. The Toptca^ 
written in 44 b.c, contains an account of the iuvention of argu- 
ments, and belongs partly to logic, partly to rhetoric. The last 
work of this class is the De Optimo Genere Oratorum, - which 
stands as a preface to the crown speeches of Demosthenes and 
Aeschines, which Cicero had translated. The chief interest con- 

^ Latrant homines, non loquunturia his strong expression, and in another 
place he calls the modern speakers damatores non oratores. 



^ 



HIS LETTERS. 181 

sists in the discussion it raises on the comparative merits of the 
Attic and Asiatic styles. 

In all these works there reigns throughout a magnificence of 
language and a calm grandeur of tone well befitting the literary 
representative of the " assembly of kings." Nowhere perhaps 
in all literature can be found compositions in which so many 
sources of permanent attraction meet; dignity, sweetness, an 
inexpressible and majestic eloquence, drawing the reader along 
until he seems lost in a sea of grand language and lofty thoughts, 
and at the same time a sympathetic human feeling, a genial desire 
to persuade, a patient perseverance in illustration, an inimitable 
clearness of expression ; admirable qualities, whose rich harmonious 
combination is perhaps incompatible with the profoundest philo- 
sophic wisdom, but which have raised Cicero to take the lead 
among those great popular teachers who have expressed, and by 
expressing furthered, the growing enlightenment of mankind. 

The letters of Cicero are among the most interesting remains of 
antiquity. The ancients paid more attention to letter-writing than 
we do; they thought their friends as worthy as the public of 
well-weighed expressions and a careful style. But no other 
writer who has come down to us can be compared with Cicero, for 
the grace, the naturalness, and the unreserve of his communications. 
Seneca and Pliny, Walpole and Pope, wrote for the world, not for 
their correspondents. i\moTig the moderns Mme. de Sevigne 
approaches most nearly to th3 excellences of Cicero. 

In the days when newspapers were unknown a Roman provin- 
cial governor depended for information solely upon private letters. 
It was of the utmost importance that he should hear from the 
capital and be able to convey his own messages to it. Yet, unless 
he was able to maintain couriers of his own, it was almost impos- 
sible to send or receive news. In such cases he had to depend on 
the fidelity of chance messengers, a precarious ground of confi- 
dence. We find that all the great nobles retained in their service 
one or more of these tahellarii. Cicero was often disquieted by 
the thought that his letters might have miscarried; at times he 
dared not write at all, so great was the risk of accident or foul 
play. 

Letters were sometimes written on parchment with a reed^ dipped 
in ink,2 but far more frequently on waxen tablets with the stilus. 
"Wax was preferred to other material, as admitting a swifter hand 
and an easier erasure. When Cicero wrote, his ideas came so fast 
that his handwriting became illegible. His brother more than once 

* Calamus. * Atramentum. 



IL 



182 HISTOKY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

complains of tliis defect. We hear of Ms writing three letters to Atticus 
in one day. Familiar missives like these were penned at any spare 
moment during the day's business, at the senate during a dull spgech, 
at the forum when witnesses were being examined, at the bath, or 
oftener still between the courses at dinner. Thrown off in a 
moment while the impression tliat dictated them was still fresh, 
they bear witness to every changing mood, and lay bare the inmost 
soul of the writer. But, as a rule, few Eomans were at the pains 
to -write their letters with their own hand. They delegated this 
mechanical process to slaves.^ It seems strange that nothing 
similar to our running hand should have been invented among 
them. Perhaps it was owing to the abundance of these humble 
aids to labour. From the constant use of amanuenses it often 
resulted that no direct evidence of authorship existed beyond the 
appended seal. When Antony read before the senate a private 
letter from Cicero, the orator replied, "What madness it is to 
bring forward as a witness against me a letter of which I might 
with perfect impunity deny the genuineness." The seal, stamped 
with the signet-ring, was of wax, and laid over the fastening of 
the thread which bound the tablets together. Hence the many 
ingenious devices for obliterating, softening, or imitating the 
impression, which are so aften alluded to by orators and satirists, 
^'lany of the more important letters, such as Cicero's to 
Lentulus, that of Quintus to Cicero, &c. were political pamphlets, 
which, after they had done their wotfk, were often published, and 
met with a ready sale. It is impossible to ascertain approximately 
the amount of copying that went on in Eome, but it was probably 
far less than is generally supposed. There is nothing so cramping 
to the inventive faculty as the existence of slave labour. IIow else 
can we account for the absence of any machinery for multiplying 
copies of documents, an inconvenience which, in the case of the 
acta diurna, as well as' of important letters, must have been keenly 
felt? Even shorthand and cipher, though known, were rarely 
practised. Caesar,^ however, used them ; but in many points he 
was beyond his age. In America, where labour is refractory, 
mechanical substitutes for it are daily being invented. A calcula- 
ting machine, and a writing machine, which not only multiplies 
but forms the original copy, are inventions so simple as to indicate 
that it was want of enterprise rather than of ingenuity which made 
the Eomans content with such an imperfect apparatus. 

1 Called Librarii or A manu. • 

2 Caesar generally used as his cipher the substitution of d for a, and so on 
throughout the alphabet. It seems strange that so extremely simple a 
device should have served his purpose. ' 



HIS LETTERS. 183 

To write a letter well one must have tlie desire to please. This 
Cicero possessed to an almost feminine extent. He thirsted for 
the approbation of the good, and when he could not get that he 
put up with the applause of the many. And thus his letters are full 
of that heartiness and vigour which comes from the determination 
to do everything he tries to do well. They have besides the most 
perfect and unmistakable reality. Every foible is confessed; every 
passing thought, even such as one would rather not confess even 
to oneself, is revealed and recorded to his friend. It is from these 
letters to a great extent that Cicero has been so severely judged. 
He stands, say his critics, self-condemned. This is true; but it is 
equally true that the ingenuity which pieces together a mosaic out 
of these scattered fragments of evidence, and labels it the character 
of Cicei'o, is altogether misapplied. One man may reveal every- 
thing ; another may reveal nothing ; our opinion in either case 
must be based on the inferences of common sense and experience 
of the world, for neither of such persons is a witness to be trusted. 
"Weakness and inconsistency are visible indeed in all Cicero's letters; 
but who can imagine Caesar or Crassus writing such letters at all 1 
The perfect unreserve which gives them their charm and their 
value for us is also the highest possible testimony to the upright- 
ness of their author. 

The collection comprises a great variety of subjects and a con- 
siderable number of correspondents. The most important are 
those to Atticus, which were abeady published in the time of 
Nepos. Other large volumes existed, of which only one, that 
entitled ad Familiares has come down entire to us. Like the 
volume to Atticus, it consists of sixteen books, extending from the 
year after his consulship until that of his death. The collection, 
was made by Tiro, Cicero's freedman, after his death, and was 
perhaps the earliest of the series. A small collection of letters to 
his brother [ad Quintum Fratrem)^ in six books, still remains, and 
a correspondence between Cicero and Brutus in two books. The 
former were written between the years 60 and 54 B.C. the latter 
in the period subsequent to the death of Caesar. The letters to 
Atticus give us information on all sorts of topics, political, pecuni- 
ary, personal, literary. Everything that occupied Cicero's mind is 
spoken of with freedom, for Atticus, though cold and prudent, had 
the rare gift of drawing others out. This quality, as well as liis 
prudence, is attested by Cornelius Nepos; and we observe that when 
he advised Cicero his coimsel was almost always wise and right. 
He sustained him in his adversity, when heart-broken and helpless 
he contemplated, but lacked courage to commit suicide ; and he 
sympathised with his success, as well as aided him in a more tan- 



184 HISTOEY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

gible sense with the resources of his vast fortune. Among the 
many things discussed in the lettei;^ we are struck by the total 
absence of the philosophical and religious questions which in other 
places he describes as his greatest delight. Eeligion, as we under- 
stand it, had no place in his heart. If we did not possess the 
letters, if we judged only by his dialogues and his orations, we 
should have imagined him deeply interested in all that concerned 
the national faith ; but we see that in his genuine moments he 
never gave it a thought. Politics, letters, art, his own fame, and 
the success of his party, such are the points on which he loves to 
dwell. But he is also most communicative on domestic matters, 
and shows the tenderest family feeling. To his wife, until the 
unhappy period of his divorce, to his brother, to his unworthy son, 
but above all to his daughter, his beloved Tulliolay he pours forth 
all the warmth of a deep affection ; and even his freedman Tiro 
comes in for a share of kindly banter which shows the friendly 
footing on which the great man and his dependant stood. Cicero 
was of all men the most humane. While accepting slavery as an 
institution of his ancestors, he did all he could to make its burden 
lighter ; he conversed with his slaves, assisted them, mourned their 
death, and, in a word, treated them as human beings. We learn 
from the letters that in this matter, and in another of equal import- 
ance, the gladiatorial shows, Cicero was far ahead of the feeling of 
his time. When he listened to his heart, it always led him right. 
And if it led him above all things to repose complete confidence 
on his one intimate friend, that only draws us to him the more ; 
he felt like Bacon that a crowd is not company, and faces are but 
a gallery of pictures, and talk is but a tinkling cymbal, where 
there is no love. 

It only remains very shortly to mention his poetry. He him- 
self knew that he had not the poetic afflatus, but his immense 
facility of style which made it as easy for him to write in verse as 
in prose, and his desire to rival the Greeks in every department of 
composition, tempted him to essay his wings in various flights of 
song. We have mentioned his poem on Marius and those on his 
consulship and times, which pleased himself best and drew forth 
from others the greatest ridicule. He wrote also versions from the 
Iliad, of which he quotes several in various Avorks ; heroic poems 
called Halcyone and Cimon, an elegy called Tamelastis,^ a Lihellus 
iocularis, about which we have no certain information, and various 

^ Tliis is Servius's spelling. Others read Temelastis, or Talemgais. Orelli 
thinks perhaps the title may been to eV eAatret {Taenelasi, corrupted to 
Tamdastis) i.e. de profectione sua, about which he tells us in the first 
Philippic. 



HIS SUCCESSOES. 185 

epigrams to Tiro, Caninius, and others. It will be neceseary to 
refer to some of these works on a future page. We shall there- 
fore pass them by here, and conclude the chapter with a short 
notice of the principal orators who were younger contemporaries 
of Cicero. 

CoELius, Avith whom Cicero was often brought into relations, was 
a quick, polished, and sometimes lofty speaker;^ Calidius a 
delicate and harmonious one. On one occasion when Calidius 
was accusing a man of conspiring against his life, he pleaded 
with such smoothness and languor, that Cicero, who was for the 
defence, at once gained his cause by the argumcntum ad 
Jwmmem. Tu istuc M. Calidi nisi fingeres sic ageres? prae- 
sertim cum ista eloquentia alienorum homimim ipericida 
defendere acerrime soleas, tuum negligeres? TJhi dolor? ubi 
ardor animi, qui etiam ex infantium ingeniis elicere. voces et 
querelas solet ? Nulla perturhatio animiy nulla corpoiis : frons 
non perciissa, non femur ; pedis, quod minimum est, mdla sup- 
plosio. Itaque tantum ahfuit ut imflammares animos nostros, 
somnum isto locovix tenebamus.^ Curio he describes as bold and 
flowing ; Calvus from affectation of Attic purity, as cold, cautious, 
and jejune. His dry, sententious style, to which Erutus also 
inclined, was a reaction from the splendour of Cicero, a splendour 
which men like these could never hope to reach ; and perhaps it 
was better that they should reject all ornament rather than mis- 
apply it. It seems that after Cicero oratory had lost the fountain 
of its life ; he responded so perfectly to the exigencies of the 
popular taste and the possibilities of the time, that after him no 
new theory of eloquence could be produced, while to improve 
upon his practice was evidently hopeless. Thus the reaction that 
comes after literary perfection conspired Avith the dawm of free- 
dom to make Cicero the last as well as the greatest of those who 
deserved the name of orator ; and we acknowledge the justice of 
the poet's epigram,^ questioned as it was at the time. 



1 Brut. 75. 2 J3rut. 80. 

* Sextilius Ena, a poet of Corduba. The story is told in Seneca, Suas. vi 



186 



HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 



APPEISTDIX. 

Poetry of Cicero, 



The poems of Cicero are of con- 
siderable importance to the student 
of Latin versification. His great 
facility and formal polish made him 
successful in producing a much more 
finished and harmonious cadence 
than had before been attained. 
Coming between Ennius and Lucre- 
tius, and evidently studied by 
the latter, he is an important 
link in metrical development. We 
propose in this note merely to give 
some examples of his versihcation 
that the student may judge for him- 
self, and comjtare them with those 
of Lucretius, Catullus, and Virgil. 
They are quoted from the edition of 
Orel li (vol. iv. p. 0112 sqq.). 

From the Marius (Cic. de Legg. I. 
i. § 2) : 
" Hie lovis altisoni subito pinnafa satelles 

Arboiis e trunco seipei:tis saucia inoisu 

SubriKit, ipsa feils tiausflgens unguibus, 
anguem 

Semianiiiium et varia graviter cervice 
micantem, 

Quern sp intorquentem lanians rostroque 
ciuentaiis, 

lam satiaty animos, iam duros ulta dolores, 

Abieeit ecflantem et laceiatum adfligit in 
unda, 

Seque obitu a solis nitidos convertit ad 
ortus. 

Hanc ubi praepetibus pennis lapsuque 
vo anteiii 

Conspexit JIarius, divini numinis augur, 

Faustaque signa suae lauiiis reditusque 
notavif, 

Partibus intonuit cacli pater ipse sinistris. 

Sicaquilae clarum firmavit luppiteronien." 

Praises of himself, from the poem on 
his consulship (Div. I. ii. § 17 sqq.) : 
*Haec tardata diu species multumque 

morata 
Consule t j tandem celsa est in sede locata, 
Atqiie una fixi ac signati tcmy)oris bora, 
luppiter excelsa el.irabat sceptra colunina; 
Et dades pa naeflamma fenoqueparata 
Vocibns Ailobrogum patribus populoque 

patebat. 
Rite igitur veteres quorum monumenta 

tenetis, 
Qui populos urbisque modo ac virtute 

regebant, 
Riteetiam vestri quorum pietasquefidesque 
Piaestitit ac longe vicit sapientia cunctos 
Praecipue colueie vigenti numine divos. 
Haec adeo ptnitus cura videri sagaci 
Otia qui studiis laeti teimere decoris, 
Inque Academia umbrifera nitidoque 

Lyceo 



Fuderunt claras fecundi pectons artis; 
E quibus ereptum prinio iam a flore in- 

ventae, 
Te patria in media virtutum mole locavit. 
Tu tanien anxiferas curas requiete relaxans 
Quod patriae vacat id studiis nobisque 

dedisti." 

"We append some verses by Quintus 
Cicero, who the orator declared would 
make a better poet than himself. 
They are on the twelve constellations, 
a well-worn but apparently attactive 
subject : 

" Flumlnavemacient obscuro lumine Pisces, 
Cuniiulumque Aries aequat noctisque 

dieque, 
Cornua quern comunt flomm praenuntia 

Tauri, 
Aridaque aestatis Gemini primordia 

paiidunt, 
Longaque iam mintiit praeclarus lumina 

Cancer, 
Languiric! sque Leo proflat ferus ore 

calores. 
Post modicum quatiens Virgo fugat orta 

vaporem. 
Autumn i reserat portas aequatque diuma 
Tempora nocturnis disperso sidere Libra, 
Et fetos ramos denudat flamma Nepai. 
Pigra sagittipotens iaculatur frigoraterris. 
BiTima gelu glacians iubare spirat Capri- 

corni : 
Quam sequitur nebulas rorans liquor altns 

Aquaii: 
Tanta sui>ra circaque vigent ubi flumina. 

Miradi 
At dextra laevaque cict rota fulgida Solis 
Mobile cuiTiculum, et Lunae simulacra 

leruntur. 
Squama sub aeterno conspectu torta 

Draconis 
Eminet: hanc inter fulgentem sidera 

septem 
Magna quatit stellans, quam servans serus 

ill alia 
Conditur Oceani ripa cum luce Bootes." 

This is poor stuff; two epigrams 
are more interesting: 



" Crede ratem ventis, animmn ne credo 
puellis: 
Namque est f eminea tutior unda fide." 

" Femina nulla bona est, et, si bona con- 
tigit ulla, 
Nescio quo fato res mala facta bona." 

We observe the entire lack of 
inspiration, combined with consider- 
able smoothness, but both in a 
feebler degree, which are character- 
istic of his brother's poems. 



CHAPTER IIL 

Historical and Biographical Composition — Caesar — ^Kepos-^ 

Sallust. 

It is •well known that Cicero felt strongly tempted to write a 
Hstory of Eome. Considering the stirring events among wMch lie 
lived, the grandeur of Eome's past, and the exhaustless literary 
resources which he himself possessed, we are not surprised either 
at his conceiving the idea or at his friends encouraging it. Never- 
theless it is fortunate for his literary fame that he abandoned the 
proposal, 1 for he would have failed in history almost more signally 
than he diet in poetry. His mind was not adapted for the kind 
of research required, nor his judgment for weighing historic evi- 
dence. When Lucceius announced his intention of writing a 
history which should include the Catilinarian conspiracy, Cicero 
did not scruple to heg him to enlarge a little on the truth. " You 
must grant something to our friendship; let me pray you to delineate 
my exploits in a way that shall reflect the greatest possible glory 
on myself. "2 A lax conception of historical responsibihty, which 
is not peculiar to Cicero. He is but an exaggerated type of his 
nation in this respect. No Eoman author, unless it be Tacitus, has 
been able fully to grasp the extreme complexity as well as difficulty 
of the historian's task. Even the sage Quintilian maintains the 
popular misconception when he says, " History is closely akin 
to poetry, and is written for purposes of narration not of proof ; 
being composed with the motive of transmitting our fame to 
posterity, it avoids the dulness of continuous narrative by the use 
of rarer words and freer periphrases."^ "We may conclude that this 

^ Cicero went so far as to write some short commentarii on his consulship 
in Greek, and perhaps in Latin also ; but they were not edited until after 
his death, and do not deserve the name of histories. 

2 Cf. ad. Fam. ; v. 12, 1, and vi. 2, 3. 

3 X. i. 31. He calls it Carmen Solutum. 



188 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 



_, 



criticism is based on a careful study of tlie greatest recognised 
models. This false opinion arose no doubt from the narrowness of 
view which persisted in regarding all kinds of literature as merely 
exercises in style. For instance accuracy of statements was not 
regarded as the goal and object of the writer's labours, but rather 
as a useful means of obtaining clearness of arrangement; abundant 
information helped towards condensation; original observation 
towards vivacity; personal experience of the events towards ^a^7i05 
or eloquence. 

So unfortunately prevalent was this view that a writer was not 
called a historian unless he had considerable pretensions to style. 
Thus, men who could write, and had written, in an informal way, 
excellent historical accounts, were not studied by their countrymen 
as historians. Their writings were relegated to the limbo of anti- 
quarian remains. The habit of writing notes of their campaigns, 
memoranda of their public conduct, copies of their speeches, &c. 
had for some time been usual among the abler or more ambitious 
nobles. Often these were kept by them, laid by for future elabora- 
tion: oftener still they were published, or sent in the form of letters 
to the author's friends. The letters of Cicero and his numerous 
correspondents present such a series of raw material for history; and 
in reading any of the antiquarian writers of Eome we are struck by 
the large number of monographs, essays, pamphlets, rough notes, 
commentaries, and the like, attributed to public men, to wliich 
they had access. 

It is quite clear that for many years these documents had existed, 
and equally clear that, unless their author was celebrated or their 
style elegant, the majority of readers entirely neglected them. 
JN'evertheless they formed a rich material for the diligent and 
capable historian. In using them, however, we could not expect 
him to show the same critical acumen, the same impartiality, as a 
modern writer trained in scientific criticism and the broad culture 
of international ideas ; to expect this would be to expect an 
impossibility. To look at events from a national instead of a 
party point of view was hard; to look at them from a human point 
of view, as Polybius had done, was still harder. Thus we cannot 
expect from Republican Eome any historical work of the same 
scope and depth as those of Herodotus and Thucydides; neither 
the dramatic genius of the one nor the philosophic insight of the 
other was to be gained there. All we can look for is a clear com- 
prehensive narrative, without flagrant misrepresentation, of some 
of the leading episodes, and such we fortunately possess in the 
memoirs of Caesar and the biogmphit al essays of Sallust. 

The immediate object of the Commentaries of Julius Caesar 



Caesar's coMxMentaries. 189 

(100-44 B.C.), was no doubt to fumisli the senate with an 
authentic miUtary report on the Gallic and Civil Wars. But they 
had also an ulterior purpose. They aspired to justify their author 
in the eyes of Eome and of posterity in his attitude of hostility to 
the constitution. 

Pompey was perhaps quite as desirous of supreme power as 
Caesar, and was equally ready to make all patriotic motives 
subordinate to self-interest. Nevertheless he gained, by his con- 
nexion with the senate, the reputation of defender of the consti- 
stution, and thought fit to appropriate the language of patriotism. 
Caesar, in his Commentaries — which, though both unfinished and, 
historically speaking, unconnected with one another, reveal the 
deeper connexion of successive products of the same creative 
policy — labours throughout to show that he acted in accordance 
with the forms of the constitution and for the general good of 
Borne. This he does not as a rule attempt to prove by argument. 
Occasionally he does so, as when any serious accusation was 
brought against the legitimacy of his acts ; and these are among 
the most important and interesting chapters in his work.^ But 
his habitual method of exculpating himself is by his persuasive 
moderation of statement, and his masterly collocation of events. 
In reading the narrative of the Civil War it is hard to resist the 
conviction that he was unfairly treated. Without any terms of 
reprobation, with scarcely any harsh language, with merely that 
wondrous skill in manipulating the series of facts which genius 
possesses, he has made his readers, even against their prepossession, 
disapprove of Pompey 's attitude and condemn the bitter hostility 
of the senate. So, too, in the report of the Gallic War, where 
diplomatic caution was less required, the same apparent candour, 
the same perfect statement of his case, appears. In every instance 
of aggressive and ambitious war, there is some equitable proposal 
refused, some act of injustice not acknowledged, some infringe- 
ment of the dignity of the Roman people committed, which makes 
it seem only natural that Caesar should exact reprisals by the 
sword. On two or three occasions he betrays how little regard he 
had for good faith when barbarians were in consideration, and 
how completely absent was that generous clemency in the case of 
a vanquished foreign prince, which when exercised towards his 
own countrymen procured him such enviable renown. ^ His 
treacherous conduct towards the Usipetes and Tenchteri, which he 
relates with perfect sang froid,^ is such as to shock us beyond 

1 See Bell. Civ. i. 4, 6, 8, 30 ; iii. 1. 

2 " dementia tua " was the way in which he caused himself to be addressed 
on occasions of ceremony. ^ B. G. iv. 12. 



190 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

description ; his brutal vengeance upon tlie Atuatici and Veneti,^ 
all whose leading men lie murdered, and sold the rest, to the 
number of 53,000, by auction ; his cruel detention of the noble 
Yercingetorix, who, after acting like an honourable foe in the field, 
voluntarily gave himself up to appease the conqueror's wrath •? 
these are blots in Caesar's scutcheon, which, if they do not place 
him below the recognised standard of action of the time, prevent 
him from being placed in any way above it. The theory that 
good faith is unnecessary with an uncivilised foe, is but the other 
side of the doctrine that it is merely a thing of expediency in the 
case of a civilised one. And neither Eome herself, nor many of 
her greatest generals, can free themselves from the grievous stain 
of perfidious dealing with those whom they found themselves 
powerful enough so to treat. 

But if we can neither approve the want of principle, nor accept 
the ex parte statements which are embodied in Caesar's Commen- 
taries^ we can admire to the utmost the incredible and almost 
superhuman activity which, more than any other quality, enabled 
him to overcome his enemies. This is evidently the means on 
which he himself most relied. The prominence he has given to 
it in his writings makes it almost equivalent to a precept. The 
burden of his achievements is the continual repetition of quam 
celerrime eontendendum ratus, — maximis citissimisque itinerihus 
profeduSj — and other phrases describing the rapidity of his move- 
ments. By this he so terrified the Pompeians that, hearing he 
was en route for Eome, they fled in such dismay as not even to 
take the money they had amassed for the war, but to leave it a 
prey to Caesar. And by the want of this, as he sarcastically 
observes, the Pompeians lost their only chance of crushing him, 
when, driven from Dyrrhachium, with his army seriously crippled 
and provisions almost exhausted, he must have succumbed to the 
numerous and well-fed forces opposed to him.^ He himself would 
never have committed such a mistake. The after- work of his 
victories was frequently more decisive than the victories them- 
selves. He always pursued his enemies into their camp, by 
storming which he not only broke their spirit, but made it difficult 
for them to retain their unity of action. ]^o man ever knew so 
well the truth of the adage "nothing succeeds like success;" and 
his Commentaries from first to last are instinct with a triumphant 
consciousness of his knowledge and of his having invariably acted 
upon it. 

^ B. G. ii. 34, and iii. 16. 2 j],, gee vii. 82. 

* It was tlien that, as Suetonius tells us, Caesar declared that Pompey 
knew not how to use a victory 



CAESAP/S COMMENTARIES. 191 

A feature wMcli strikes every reader of Caesar is tlie admiration 
and respect hcf has for his soldiers. Though unsparing of their 
lives when occasion demanded, he never speaks of them as " food 
for powder." Once, when his men clamoured for battle, hut he 
thought he could gain his point without shedding blood, he refused 
to fight, though the discontent became alarming : " Cur, etiam 
secundo praelio, aliquas ex suis amitteret? Cur vulnerari pateretur 
optime meritos de se milites? cur denique fortunam periclitaretur, 
praesertim cum non minus esset imperatoris consilio superare 
quam gladiol" This consideration for the lives of his soldiers, 
when the storm was over, won him gTatitude ; and it was no single 
instanee. Everywhere they are mentioned with high praise, and 
no small portion of the victory is ascribed to them. Stories of 
individual valour are inserted, and several centurions singled out 
for special commendation. Caesar lingers with delight over the 
exploits of his tenth legion. Officers and men are all fondly 
remembered. The heroic conduct of Pulfio and Yarenus, who 
challenge each other to a display of valour, and by each saving 
the other's life are reconciled to a friendly instead of a hostile 
rivalry -} the intrepidity of the veterans at Lissus, whose self- 
reliant bravery calls forth one of the finest descriptions in the 
whole book ;2 and the loyal devotion of all when he announces 
liis critical position, and asks if they will stand by him,^ are 
related with glowing pride. I^umerous other merely incidental 
notices, scattered through both works, confirm the pleasing impres- 
sion that commander and commanded had full confidence in each 
other; and he relates^ with pardonable exultation the speak- 
ing fact that among all the hardships they endured (hardships so 
terrible that Pompey, seeing the roots on which they subsisted, 
declared he had beasts to fight v/ith and not men) not a soldier 
except Labienus and two Gaulish officers ever deserted his cause, 
though thousands came over to him from the opposite side. It is 
the greatest proof of his power over men, and thereby, of his 
military capacity, IJiat perhaps it is possible to show. 

Besides their clear description of military manoeuvres, of engin- 
eering, bridge-making, and all kinds of operations, in which they 
may be compared with the despatches of the great generals of 
modern times, Caesar's Commentaries contain nuich useful infor- 
mation regarding the countries he visited. There is a wonderful 
freshness and versatility about his mind. "While i)rimarily con- 
sidering a country, as he was forced to do, from its strategical 
features, or its capacity for furnishing contingents or tribute, he 

1 ?>. G. V. 36 = Tb. ill 25. 3 i^^ ^ qj 4 jj^ ^^ ^g 



192 HISTOEY OF EOMAN LITEEATL'LE. . 

was nevertheless keenly alive to all objects of interest, whether in 
nature or in human customs. The inquiring curiosity with which 
Lucan upbraids him during his visit to Egypt, if it were not on 
that occasion assumed, as some think, to hide his real projects, was 
one of the chief characteristics of his mind. As soon as he thought 
Gaul was quiet he hurried to Illyria,^ animated by the desire to 
see those nations, and to observe their customs for himself. His 
journey into Eritain, though by Suetonius attributed to avarice, 
which had been kindled by the report of enormous pearls of fine 
quality to be found on our coasts, is by himself attributed to his 
desire to see so strange a country, and to be the first to conquer it.^ 
His account of our island, though imperfect, is extremely interest- 
ing. He mentions many of our products. The existence of lead 
and iron ore was known to him; he does not allude to tin, but its 
occurrence can hardly have been unknown to him. He remarks 
that the beech and pine do not grow in the south of England, 
which is probably an inaccuracy;^ and he falls into the mistake of 
supposing that the north of Scotland enjoys in winter a period of 
thirty days total darkness. His account of Gaul, and, to a certain 
extent, of Germany, is more explicit. He gives a fine description 
of the Druids and their mysterious religion, noticing in particular 
the firm belief in the immortality of the soul, which begot indiffe- 
rence to death, and was a great incentive to bravery.* The effects 
of this belief are dwelt on by Lucan in one of his most effective 
passages,^ which is greatly borrowed from Caesar. Their knowledge 
of letters, and their jealous restriction of it to themselves and 
express prohibition of any written literature, he attributes partly 
to their desire to keep the people ignorant, the common feeling of 
a powerful priesthood, and partly to a conviction that writing 
injures the memory, which among men of action should be kept 
in constant exercise. His acquaintance with German civilization 
is more superficial, and shows that incapacity for scientific criticism 

1 B. G. iii. 7. 

2 Suetonius thus speaks (Vit. Cues. 24) of his wanton aggression, "iVgc 
deinde nlla belli occasione ne iniusti quidcm ac periculosi ahstinuit tarn fede- 
ratis tarn infcstis ac feris gcntibus idtro lacessitis. " An excellent comment on 
Roman lust of dominion. 

'^ I am told by Professor Rolleston that Caesar is here mistaken. The 
pine, by which he presumably meant the Scotch fir, certainly existed in the 
first century B.C.; and as to the beech, Buniham beeches were then fine 
young trees. Doubtless changes have come over our vegetation. The linden 
or lime is a Eoman importation, the small-leaved species alone being indige- 
nous; so is the English elm, which has now developed specific dilferences, 
which have caused botanists to rank it apart. There is, perhaps, some 
uncertainty as to the exact import of the word fagus. 

4 B. G. vi. 11, sqq. 5 phars. i. 445-457. 



TRUSTWORTHINESS OF CAESAE's STATEMENTS. 193 

wliich was common to all antiquity.^ His testimony to tlie chastity 
of the German race, confirmed afterwards by Tacitus, is interest- 
ing as showing one of the causes which have contributed to its 
greatness. He relates, with apparent belief, the existence of several 
extraordinary quadrupeds in the vast Hercynian forest, such as the 
unicorn of heraldry, which here first appears ; the elk, which has 
no joints to its legs, and cannot lie down, whose bulk he depreci- 
ates as much as he exaggerates that of the urus or wild bull, which 
he describes as hardly inferior to the elephant in size. To have 
slain one of these gigantic animals, and carried off its horns as a 
trophy, was almost as great a glory as the possession of the grizzly 
bear's claws among the Indians of the Rocky Mountains. Some 
of his remarks on the temper of the Gauls might be applied almost 
without change to their modern representatives. The French elan 
is done ample justice to, as well as the instability and self-esteem 
of that great people. " Ut ad bella suscipienda Gallorum alacer 
et promx^tus est animus, sic mollis ac minime resistens ad calami- 
tates perferendas mens eorum est.^ And again, " quod sunt in 
capessendis cojisilus mohiles et novis pAerumque reJms student.''^ 
He notices the tall stature of both Gauls and Germans, which was 
at first the cause of some terror to his soldiers, and some contemp- 
tuousness on their part.^ " Plerisque hominibus Gallis prae mag- 
nitudine corporura suorum brevitas nostra contemptui est." 

Caesar himself was of commanding presence, great bodily endu- 
rance, and heroic personal daring. These were qualities which his 
enemies knew how to respect. On one occasion, when his legions- 
were blockaded in Germany, he penetrated at night to his camp 
disguised as a Gaul; and in more than one battle he turned the 
fortune of the day by his extraordinary personal courage, fighting 
on foot before his wavering troops, or snatching the standard from 
the centurion's timid grasp. He took the greatest pains to collect 
accurate information, and frequently he tells us who his informants 
were.^ "Where there was no reason for the suppression or mis- 
representation of truth, Caesar's statements may be implicitly relied 
on. Ko man knewhuman nature better, or how to decide between 
conflicting assertions. He rarely indulges in conjecture, but in 
investigating the motives of his adversaries he is penetrating and 
unmerciful. At the commencement of the treatise on the civil 
war he gives his opinion as to the considerations that weighed with 
Lentulus, Cato, Scipio, and Pompey; and it is characteristic of the 
man that of all he deals most hardly with Cato, whose pretensions 
annoyed him, and in whose virtue he did not believe. To the 

1 B. G. vi. 19. 2 jb, iii. 20. 8 lb. iv. 5. * lb, see i. 30; 11 30. 
® lb. ii. 17; V. 5. lb. iii. 16, 49, and many other passages. 



194 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

bravest of Ms Gallic enemies lie is not unjust. The ^N'ervii in par- 
ticular, by their courage and self-devotion, excite his warm admi- 
ration, ^ and while he felt it necessary to exterminate them, they 
seem to have been among the very few that moved his pity. 

As to the style of these two great works, no better criticism can 
be given than that of Cicero in the Brutus;'^ " They are worthy of 
all praise : they are unadorned, straightforward, and elegant, every 
ornament being stripped off as it were a garment. While he desired 
to give others the material out of which to create a history ; he 
may perhaps have done a kindness to conceited writers who wish to 
trick them out with meretricious graces ; ^ but he has deterred all 
men of sound taste from touching them. For in history a pure 
and brilliant conciseness of style is the highest attainable beauty." 
Condensed as they are, and often almost bald, they have that match- 
less clearness which marks the mind that is master of its entire 
subject. We have only to compare them with the excellent but 
immeasurably inferior commentaries of Hirtius to estimate their 
value in this respect. Precision, arrangement, method, are qualities 
that never leave them from beginning to end. It is much to be re- 
gretted that they are so imperfect and that the text is not in a better 
state. In the Civil War particularly, gaps frequently occur, and both 
the beginning and the end are lost. They were written during the 
campaign, though no doubt cast into their present form in the in- 
tervals of winter leisure. Hirtius, who, at Caesar's request, appended 
an eighth book to the Gallic War, tells us in a letter to Balbus, how 
rapidly he wrote. " I wish that those who will read my book 
could know how unwillingly I took it in hand, that I might 
acquit myself of folly and arrogance in completing what Caesar had 
begun. Tor all agree that the elegance of these commentaries sur- 
passes the most laborious efforts of other writers. They were 
edited to prevent historians being ignorant of matters of such high 
importance. But so highly are they approved by the universal 
verdict that the power of amplifying them has been rather taken 
away than bestowed by their publication.* And yet I have a right" 
to marvel at this even more than others. For while others know 
how faultlessly they are written, I know with what ease and 
rapidity he dashed them off. For Caesar, besides the highest con- 
ceivable literary gift, possessed the most perfect skill in explain- 
ing his designs." Tins testimony of his most intimate friend is 

1 B. G. ii. 16, 207. 2 prut. ixxv. 262. 

3 '* Calamistris inurere,''^ a metaphor from curling the hair with hot irons. 
The entire description is in the language of sculpture, by which Cicero, 
implies that Caesar's style is statuesque. 

^ *■* Praerei)ta non x>raehita faculias.'* 



OTHER WRITERS OF COMMENTARIES. ] 95 

confirmed by a careful perusal of tlie works, tlie elaboration of wbicb, 
thougb very great, consists, not in the execution of details, bub in 
tbe carefully meditated design. The Commentaries have always 
been a favourite book with soldiers as with scholars. Their La- 
tinity is not more pure than their tactics are instructive. ISTor are 
the loftier graces of composition wanting. The speeches of Curio 
rise into eloquence.^ Petreius's despair at the impending desertion 
of his army 2 is powerfully drawn, and the contrast, brief but 
effective, between the Pompeians' luxury and his own army's 
want of common necessaries, assumes all the grandeur of a moral 
warning. 3 

The example of their general and their own devotion induced 
other distinguished men to complete his work. A. Hirtius (consul 
43 B.C.), who served with him in the Gallic and Civil Wars, as we 
have seen, added at his request an eighth book to the history of 
the former ; and in the judgment of the best critics the Alexandrine 
War is also by his hand. Prom these two treatises, which are 
written in careful imitation of Caesar's manner, we form a high 
conception of the literary standard among men of education. For 
Hirtius, though a good soldier and an efficient consul, was a literary 
man only by accident. It was Caesar who ordered him to write, 
first a reply to Cicero's panegyric on Cato, and then the Gallic 
Commentary. Nevertheless, his two books show no inferiority in 
taste or diction to those of his illustrious chief. They of course 
lack his genius ; but there is the same purity of style, the same 
perfect moderation of language. 

Nothing is more striking than the admirable taste of the highest 
conversational language at Eome in the seventh century of the 
Pepublic. Not only Hirtius,. but Matins, Balbus, Sulpicius, 
Brutus, Cassius and other correspondents of Cicero, write to him 
in a dialect as pure as his own. It is true they have not his 
grace, his inimitable freedom and copiousness. Most of them are 
somewhat laboured, and give us the impression of having acquired 
with difficulty the control of their inflexible material. But the 
intimate study of the noble language in which they wrote compels 
us to admit that it was fully equal to the clear exposition of the 
severest thought and the most subtle dij^lomatic reasoning. But 
its prime was already passing. Even men of the noblest family 
could not without long discipline attain the lofty standard of the 
best conversational requirements. Sextus Pompeius is said to have 
been sermone harharus.^ On this Niebuhr well remarks : " It is 

1 B.C. ii. 27, 28. 2 jb. i. 67. 

' lb. iii. 78. Compare also the brilliant descri] 'tion of the siege of Salonae, 
iii. 7 * Veil. Pat. ii. 73. 



I 



196 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

remarkalDle to see how at that time men who did not receive a 
thorougli education neglected their mother-tongue, and spoke a 
corrupt form of it. The urhanitas, or perfection of the language, 
easily degenerated unless it were kept up by careful study. Cicero ^ 
speaks of the sermo urbanus in the time of Laelius, and observes 
that the ladies of that age spoke exquisitely. But in Caesars 
time it had begun to decay." Caesar, in one of his writings, tells 
his reader to shun like a rock every unusual form of speech. ^ 
And this admirable counsel he has himself generally followed — 
but few provincialisms or archaisms can be detected in his pages. ^ 
In respect of style he stands far at the head of all the Latin his- 
torians. The authorship of the African War is doubtful ; it seems 
best, with Niebuhr, to assign it to Oppius. The Spanish War is 
obviously written by a person of a different sort. It may either 
be, as Niebuhr thinks, the work of a centurion or military tribune 
in the common rank of life, or, as we incline to think, of a pro- 
vincial, perhaps a Spaniard, who was well read in the older literature 
of Eome, but could not seize the complex and delicate idiom of the 
heau vionde of his day. With vulgarisms like hene magni, in opere 
di'stenti,^ and inaccuracies like ad ignoscendum for ad se exeusan- 
dum,^ quam opirnam for quam optimam,^ he combines quotations 
from Ennius, e.g. hie pes pede premitur, armis teruntur arma,'' and 
rhetorical constructions, e.g. alteri alteris non solum mortem morti 
exaggerabant, sed tumulos tumults exaequabant.^ He quotes the 
words of Caesar in a form of which we can hardly believe the 
dictator to have been guilty : " Caesar gives conditions : he never 
receives them-:" ^ and again, "7 am Caesar: I keep my faith." ^^ 
Points like these, to which we may add his fondness for dwelling 
on horrid details ^^ (always omitted by Caesar), and for showy 
descriptions, as that of the single combat between Turpio and 
Niger, ^2 seem to mark him out as in mind if not in race a Spaniard. 
These are the very features we find recurring in Lucan and Seneca, 
which, joined to undoubted talent, brought a most pernicious 
element into the Latin style. 

To us Caesar's literary power is shown in the sphere of history. 
Eut to his contemporaries he was even more distinguished in other 
fields. As an orator he was second, and only second, to Cicero. ^^ 
His vigorous sense, close argument, brilliant wit, and perfect com- 

i De Or. iii. 12, ^ See Jul. Gell i. 10. 

s The word avibachis {-^cNens); and the forms malacia, detrimentosuSf 
lihertaii (abl.), Senatu (dat.). But these last can be paralleled from Cicero. 

4 B. H. 5. ^ Id. 5, « Id. 33. ^ Id. 31. 8 id. 5. 

«Id. 15. iMd. 19. 11^'. p. 20. ^'^ Ih. 

^ Tac. De Or, 21, ** Non alius contra Ciceronem nominar§tur." Quint. 
X. i. Ill 



Caesar's oratorical and scientific position. 197 

mand of language, made him, from liis first appsarance as accuser 
of Dolabella at the age of 22, one of the foremost orators of Eome. 
And he possessed also, though he kept in check, that greatest 
weapon of eloquence, the power to stir the passions. But with him 
eloquence was a means, not an end. He spoke to gain his point, 
not to acquire fame ; and thus thought less of enriching than of 
enforcing his arguments. One ornament of speech, however, he 
pursued with the greatest zeal, namely, good taste and refinement ;i 
and in this, according to Cicero, he stood ahove all his rivals. 
Unhappily, not a single speech remains ; only a few characteristic 
fragments, from which we can but feel the more how much we 
have lost. 2 

Besides speeches, which were pari of his public life, he showed 
a deep interest in science. He wrote a treatise on grammar, 
de Andlogia, for which he found time in the midst of one of his 
busiest campaigns^ and dedicated to Cicero,* much to the orator's 
delight. In the dedication occur these generous words, " If many 
by study and practice have laboured to express their thoughts in 
noble language, of which art I consider you to be almost the 
author and originator, it is our duty to regard you as one who 
has well deserved of the name and dignity of the Roman people." 
The treatise was intended as an introduction to philosophy and 
eloquence, and was itself founded on philosophical principles;^ 
and beyond doubt it brought to bear on the subject that luminous 
arrangement which was inseparable from Caesar's mind. Some of 
his conclusions are curious ; he lays down that the genitive of 
dies is die ; ^ the genitive plural of j'^cinis, pars ; j)anum, partum / 
the accusative of turbo, turhonem ;^ the perfect of mordeo and the 
like, memordi not momordi ;^ the genitive of Pompeius, Pompeiii^^ 
The forms maximus, optimus, municipium}'^ &c. which he intro- 
duced, seem to have been accepted on his authority, and to have 
established themselves finally in the language. 

As chief pontifex he interested himself with a digest of the 
Auspices, which he carried as far as sixteen books. ^^ xhe Augur- 
alia, which are mentioned by Priscian, are perhaps a second part 
of the same treatise. He also wrote an essay on Divination^ 

1 Elcgantia, Brut. 72, 252. 

2 The best will be found in Suet. Jul. Caes. vi. Aul. Gel. v. 13, xiii. 3. 
Yal. Max. v. 3. Besides we can form some idea of them from the analysis 
of them in his own Commentaries. 

^ De Analogia, in two books, Suet. 56. ■* Brut. Ixxii. 

^ See the long quotation iu Gell. xix. 8. ^ Cell. ix. 14. 

^Charis. i. 114. s jbid. 

9 Cell. vii. 9. lo Pri.sc. i. 545. 

1^ Ciissiod. ex Annaeo Cornuto.— Z/c Orthog. col. 2228. ^^ Macrob. i. 16. 



198 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

like tliat of Cicero. In this lie probably disclosed Ms real 
opinions, wMcli we know from other sources were those of the 
extremest scepticism. There seemed no incongruity in a man 
who disbelieved the popular religion holding the sacred office of 
pontifex. The persuasion that religion was merely a department 
of the civil order was considered, even by Cicero, to absolve men 
from any conscientious allegiance to it. After his elevation to 
the perpetual dictatorship he turned his mind to astronomy, owing 
to the necessities of the calendar ; and composed, or at least pub- 
lished, several books which were thought by no means unscientific, 
and are frequently quoted. ^ Of his poems we shall speak in 
another place. The only remaining works are his two pamphlets 
against Cato, to which Juvenal refers i^ 

" Maiorem quanj sunt duo Caesaris Anticatones." 
These were intended as a reply to Cicero's laudatory essay, but 
though written with the greatest abihty, were deeply prejudiced 
and did not carry the people with them.^ The witty or proverbial 
sayings of Caesar were collected either during his life, or after his 
death, and formed an interesting collection. Some of them attest 
his pride, as "If?/ luord is Imv;"^ '■^ I am not ling, hut Caesar ;''^ 
others his clemency, as, ^' Spare the citizeiis ;^'^ others his greatness 
of soul, as, " Caesar's wife must he ahove susjoicion.'^'^ 

Several of his letters are preserved; they are in admirable 
taste, but do not present any special points for criticism. With 
Caesar ends the collection of genuine letter-writers, who wrote in 
conversational style, Avithout reference to publicity. In after 
times we have indeed numerous so-called letters, but they are no 
longer the same class of composition as these, nor have any recent 
letters the vigour, grace, and freedom of those of Cicero and Caesar. 

A friend of many great men, and especially of Atticus, 
Cornelius Nepos (74?-24 e.g.) owes his fame to the kindness of 
fortune more than to his own achievements. Had we possessed 
only the account of him given by his friends, we should have be- 
wailed the loss of a learned and eloquent author.^ Fortunately we 
have the means of judging of his talent by a short fragment of his 
work On Illustrious Men, which, though it relegates him to the 
second rank in intellect, does credit to his character and heart. ^ It 

1 E.g. Macrob. Sat. i. 16. Plin. xviii. 26. ^ g^t. vi. 834. 

3 Cicero calls them Vituperationes, ad Alt. xii. 41. ^ Suet. Caes. 77. 

^ Suet. 79. 6 i)5_ 75 ^i^y. j^, ^^ 50. 

P^. 74. s Dodis lapitcr! ct labor iosis, Cat. i. 7. 

" JMove particularly the life of his friend Atticus, which breatlies a really 
beautiful spirit, though it suppresses some tniits in his character which a 
perfectly truthful account would not have suppressed. 



COENELIUS NEP03. 199 

consists of the lives of several Greek generals and statesmen, written 
in a compendious and popular style, adapted especially for school 
reading, where it has always heen in great request. Besides these 
there are short accounts of Hamilcar and Hannibal, and of the 
Eomans, Cato and Atticus. The last-mentioned biography is an 
extract from a lost work, De Historicis Latiids, among whom 
friendship prompts him to class the good-natured and cultivated 
banker. The series of illustrious men extended over sixteen 
books, and was divided under the headings of kings, generals, 
lawyers, orators, poets, historians, philosophers, and grammarians. 
To each of these two books were devoted, one of Greek, and one 
of Latin examples.^ Of those we possess the life of Atticus is the 
only one of any historical value, the rest being mere super- 
ficial compilations, and not always from the best authorities. 
Besides the older generation, he had friends also among the 
younger. Catullus, who like him came from Gallia Cisalpiua, 
pays in his first poem the tribute of gratitude, due probably to 
his timely patronage. The work mentioned there as that on which 
the fame of JN'epos rested was called Chronica. It seems to have 
been a laborious attempt to form a comparative chronology of Greek 
and Eoman History, and to have contained three books. Subse- 
quently, he preferred biographical studies, in which field, besides 
his chief work, he edited a series of Exempla, or patterns for 
imitation, of the character of our modern Self Help, and intended 
to wean youthful minds from the corrupt fashions of their time. A 
Life of Cicero would probably be of great use to us, had fortune 
spared it ; for ISTepos knew Cicero well, and had access through 
Atticus to all his correspondence. At Atticus's request he wrote 
also a biography of Cato at greater length than the short one which 
we possess. It has been observed by Merivale^ that the Eomans 
were specially fitted for biographical writing. The rhetorical cast 
of their minds and the disposition to reverence commanding 
meiifc made them admirable panygerists ; and few would celebrate 
•wher3 they did not mean to praise. Of his general character as 
a historian Mr Oscar Browning in his useful edition says : " He is 
most untrustworthy. It is often difficult to disentangle the 
wilful complications of his chronology ; and he tries to enhance 
the value of what he is relating by a fooHsh exaggeration which 
is only too transparent to deceive." His style is clear, a merit 
attributable to the age in which he lived, and, as a rule, elegant, 
though verging here and there to prettiness. Though of the same 
age as Caesar he adopts a more modern Latinity. We miss the 

^ This is Nipperdey's arrangement. ^ Hist. Rom. vol. viii. 



200 HISTOEY OF KOMAN LITERATURE. 

quarried marble wMcli polish hardens hut does not wear away. 
l!^epos's language is a softer substance, and becomes thin beneath 
the file. He is occasionally inaccurate. In the Pliociov}- we have 
a sentence incomplete ; in the Chah'ias^ we have an accusative 
(Agesilaum) with nothing to govern it ; we have ante se for ante 
eum, a fault, by the way, into which almost every Latin writer is 
apt to fall, since the rules on which the true practice is built are 
among the subtlest in any language. ^ We have poetical construc- 
tions, as tollere consilia iniit ; popular ones, as infitias it, dum 
with the perfect tense, and colloquialisms like impraesentiarum ; 
we have Graecizing words like deuteretur, autonnatias, and curious 
inflexions such as Thuynis, Coti, Datami, genitives of ThuySy 
Cotys,'^ and Datames, respectively. We see in Nepos, as in Xeno- 
phon, the first signs of a coming change. He forms a link 
between the exclusively prosaic style of Cicero and Caesar, and 
prose softened and coloured with poetic beauties, which was 
brought to such perfection by Livy. 

After the life of Hannibal, in the MS., occurred an epigram by 
the grammarian Aemilius Probus inscribing the work to Theo- 
dosius. Ey this scholars were long misled. It was Lambinus 
who first proved that the pure Latinity of the lives could not, 
except by magic, be the product of the Theodosian age ; and as 
ancient testimony amply justified the assignment of the life of 
Atticus to JSTepos, and he was known also to have been the author 
of just such a book as came out under Probus's name, the great 
scholar boldly drew the conclusion that the series of biographies 
we possess were the veritable work of Ilepos. For a time con- 
troversy raged. A via media was discovered which regarded 
them as an abridgment in Theodosius's time of the fuller original 
work. But even this, which was but a concession to prejudice, 
is now generally abandoned, and few would care to dispute the 
accuracy of Lambinus's penetrating criticism.^ 

The first artistic historian of Eome is C. Sallustius Crispus 
(86-34 B.C.). This great writer was born at Amiternum in the 
year in which Marius died, and, as we know from himself, he 
came to Eome burning with ambition to ennoble his name, and 
studied with that purpose the various arts of popularity. He rose 
steadily through the quaestorship to the tribuneship of the plebs 
(52 B.C.), and so became a member of the senate. From this position 

1 ii. 2. 2 i. 2. 

3 They are fully expounded in the second volume of Roby's Latin 
Grammar. 

^ Unless Cotus be thought a more accurate representative of the Greek. 
* Nipperdey, xxxvi.-xxxviii. quoted by Teuffel. 



SALLUST. 201 

he was degraded (50 b.c.) on the plea of adultery, committed 
some years before with the wife of Annius Milo, a disgrace ho 
seems to have deeply felt, although it was probably instigated by 
political and not moral disapprobation. For Sallust was a warm 
admirer and partisan of Caesar, who in time (47 B.C.) made him 
praetor, thus restoring his rank; and assigned him (46 B.C.) the 
province of Numidia, from which he carried an enormous fortune, 
for the most part, we fear, unrighteously obtained. On his return 
(45 B.C.), content with his success, he sank into private life; and 
to the leisure and study of his later years we owe the works that 
have made him famous. He employed his wealth in ministering 
to his comfort. His favourite retreats were a villa at Tibur which 
had once been Caesar's, and a magnificent palace which he built 
in the suburbs of Eome, surrounded by pleasure-grounds, after- 
wai^s well-known as the " Gardens of Sallust," and as the residence 
of successive emperors. The preacher of ancient virtue was an 
adept in modem luxury. Augustus chose the historian's dwelling 
as the scene of his most sumptuous entertainments ; Yespasian pre- 
ferred it to the palace of the Caesars ; Nerva and Aurelian, stern 
as they were, made it their constant abode. ^ And yet Sallust was 
not a happy man. The inconsistency of conduct and the whirl- 
wind of political passion in which most men then lived seems to have 
sapped the springs of life and worn out body and mind before their 
time. Caesar's activity had at his death begun to make him old \^ 
Sallust lived only to the age of 52 ; Lucretius and Catullus were 
even younger when they died. And the views of life presented 
in their works are far from hopeful. Sallust, indeed, praises 
virtue ; but it is an ideal of the past, colossal but extinct, on which 
his gloomy eloquence is exhausted. Among his contemporaries 
he finds no vestige of ancient goodness; honour has become a 
traffic, ambition has turned to avarice, and envy has taken the 
place of public spirit. From this scene of turpitude he selects two 
men who in diverse ways recall the strong features of antiquity. 
These are Caesar and Cato ; the one the idol of the people, whom 
with real persuasion they adored as a god;^ the other the idol of 
the senate, whom the Pompeian poet exalts even above the gods.* 
The contrast and balancing of the virtues of these two great men 
is one of the most efi'ective passages in Sallust.^ 

From his position in public life and from his intimacy with 
Caesar, he had gained excellent opportunities of acquiring correct 
information. The desire to write history seems to have come on 
him in later life. Success had no more illusions for him. The 

1 Dunlop, ii. p. 146. 2 g^et. Caes. 45. " lb. 56. 

* Victrix causa deis ji^cf'Cuit, scd victa Catoni — Pilars, i. 128. ^ Catil. 53. 



202 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

bitterness with wliicli lie touclies on his early misfortunes ^ shows 
that their memory still rankled within him. And the pains with 
which he justifies his historial pursuits indicate a stifled anxiety 
to enter once more the race for honours, which yet experience tells 
him is but vanity. The profligacy of his youth, grossly overdrawn 
by malice,^ was yet no doubt a ground of remorse ; and though 
the severity of his opening chapters is somewhat ostentatious, there 
is no intrinsic mark of insincerity about them. They are, it is 
true, quite superfluous. lugurtha's trickery can be understood 
without a preliminary discourse on the immortality of the soul ; 
and Catiline's character is not such as to suggest a preface on the 
dignity of writing history. Eut with all their inappropriateness, 
these introductions are valuable specimens of the writer's best 
thoughts and concentrated vigour of language. In the Catiline^ 
his earliest work, he announces his attention of subjecting certain 
episodes of Eoman history^ to a thorough treatment, omitting 
those parts which had been done justice to by former writers. 
Thus it is improbable that Sallust touched the period of Sulla,* 
both from the high opinion he formed of Sisenna's account, and 
from the words neque alio loco de Sullae rebus diduri surmis ;^ 
nevertheless, some of the events he selected doubtless fell within 
Sulla's lifetime, and this may have given rise to the opinion that 
he wrote a history of the dictator. Though Sallust's Historiae 
are generally described as a consecutive work from the premature 
movements of Lepidus on Sulla's death^ (78 B.C.) to the end of the 
Mithridatic war (63 b.c.) ; this cannot be proved. It is equally 
possible that his series of independent historical cameos may have 
been published together, arranged in chronological order, and under 
the common title of Historiae. The lugurtha and Caiilina, how- 
ever, are separate works; they are always quoted as such, and 
formed a kind of commencement and finish to the intermediate 
studies., 

Of the histories (in five books dedicated to the younger Lucul- 
lus), we have but a few fragments, mostly speeches, of which the 

^ Cat. 3. The chapter is very characteristic ; Jug. 3, scarcely less so. 

^ Suet. Gram. 15, tells us that a freedmau of Pompey named Lenaeus 
vilified Sallust ; he quotes one sentence : Nehulonem vita scriptisque monstro- 
suni ; praeterea priscoruvi Catonisque ineruditissimum furem. Of. Pseudo- 
Cic. Decl. in Sail. 8 ; Dio Hist. Rom. 43, 9. 

3 Res gestas carptim ut quaeque memoria digna videhantur, perscribere. 
Cat. 4. 

^ Anson, id, iv. ad Nepotem implies that he began his history 90 B.C. 
Cf. Plutarch, Compar. of Sulla and Lysander. And see on this controversy 
Pict. Biog. s. v. Sallust. ^ Jug. 95. « Suet. J.C. 3. 



SALLUST. 203 

style seems a little fuller than usual : our judgment of the writer 
must be based upon tbe two essays tbat have readied us entire, 
that on the war with lugurtha, and that on the Catilinarian con- 
spiracy. Sallust takes credit to himself, in words that Tacitus 
has almost adopted,^ for a strict impartiality. Compared with his 
predecessors he probably was impartial, and considering the close- 
ness of the events to his own time it is doubtful whether any one 
could have been more so. For he wisely confined himself to 
periods neither too remote for the testimony of eye-witnesses, nor 
too recent for the disentanglement of truth. When Catiline fell 
(63 B.C.) the historian was twenty-two years old, and this is the 
latest point to which his studies reach. As a friend of Caesar he 
was an enemy of Cicero, and two declamations are extant, the 
productions of the reign of Claudius, ^ in which these two great 
men vituperate one another. But no vituperation is found in 
Sallust's works. There is, indeed, a coldness and reserve, a dis- 
inclination to praise the conduct and even the oratory of the 
consul which bespeaks a mind less noble than Cicero's.^ But 
facts are not perverted, nor is the odium of an unconstitutional 
act thrown on Cicero alone, as we know it was thrown by 
Caesar's more unscrupulous partisans, and connived at by Caesar 
himself. The veneration of Sallust for his great chief is con- 
spicuous. Caesar is brought into steady prominence ; his influence 
is everywhere implied. But Sallust, however clearly he betrays 
the ascendancy of Caesar over himself,* does not on all points 
follow his lead. While, with Caesar, he believes fortune, or 
more properly chance, to rule human affairs, he retains his belief 
in virtue and immortality,^ both of which Caesar rejected. He 
can not only admit, but glorify the virtues of Cato, which Caesar 
ridiculed and denied. But he is anxious to set the democratic 
policy in the most favourable light. Hence he depicts Cato 
rather thar Cicero as the senatorial champion, because his imprac- 
ticable views seemed to justify Caesar's opposition;^ he throws into 
fierce rehef the vices of Scaurus who was prlnceps Senatus ; ^ and 
misrepresents the conduct of Turpilius through a desire to screen 
Marius.^ As to his authorities, we find that he gave way to the 
prevailing tendency to manipulate them. The speeches of Caesar 

^ A spe, metu, partibus, liber. — Cat. 4 ; cf. Tac. Hist. i. 1. So in the 
Annals, sine ira et studio. 

2 This is not certain, but the consensus of scholars is in favour of it. 

2 Cat. 31, Cicero's speech is called litculenta atque utilis RHpiiblicae, ct 
cli. 48. 

4 lb. 8, 41, compared with Caes. B. C. ii. 8 ; iii. 58, 60. 

" lb. 1, compared with 52 (Caesar's speech). 

« See esp. Cat. 54. ^ Jug. 15. » lb. 67. 



204 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

and Cato in tlie senate, whice lie surely miglit have transcribed^ 
lie prefers to remodel according to his own ideas, eloquently no 
doubt, but the originals would have been in better place, and 
entitled him to our gratitude. The same may be said of the 
speech of Marius. That of IMemmius^ he professes to give intact ; 
but its genuineness is doubtful. The letter of Catiline to Catulus, 
that of Lentulus and his message to Catiline, may be accepted as 
original documents. 2 In the sifting of less accessible authorities 
he is culpably careless. His account of the early history of Africa 
is almost worthless, though he speaks of having drawn it from the 
books of King Hiempsal, and taken pains to insert what was 
generally thought worthy of credit. It is in the delineation of 
character that Sallust's penetration is unmistakably shown. 
Besides the instances already given, we may mention the admir- 
able sketch of Sulla, ^ and the no less admirable ones of Catiline* 
and lugurtha.^ His power of depicting the terrors of conscience 
is tremendous. ISTo language can surpass in condensed but lifelike 
intensity the terms in which he paints the guilty noble carrying 
remorse on his countenance and driven by inward agony to acts 
of desperation.^ 

His style is peculiar. He himself evidently imitated, and was 
thought by Quintilian to rival, Thucydides.'' But the resem- 
blance is in language only. The deep insight of the Athenian 
into the connexion of events is far removed from the popular 
jhetoric in which the Eoman deplores the decline of virtue. And 
the brevity, by which both are characterised, while in the one it 
is nothing but the incapacity of the hand to keep pace with the 
rush of thought, in the other forms the artistic result of a careful 
process of excision and compression. While the one kindles 
reflection, the other baulks it. Nevertheless the style of SaUust 
has a special charm and will always find admirers to give it 
the palm among Latin histories. The archaisms which adorn or 
deface it, the poetical constructions which tinge its classicahty, the 
rough periods without particles of connexion which impart to 
it a masculine hardness, are so fused together into a harmonious 
fabric that after the first reading most students recur to it with 
genuine pleasure,* On the whole it is more modern than that of 

1 Jug. 31. 2 Cat. 35, 43 ; cf. also ch. 49. 3 jug. 95. 

* Cat. 5. '^ Jug. 6, sqq. ° Cat. 15, and very similarly Jug. 72. 

' Quint. X. 1, Kec opponere Thucydidi Sallustium verear. The most 
obvious imitations are, Cat. 12, 13, where the general decline of virtue seems 
hased on Thuc. iii. S2, 83 ; and the speeches which obviously take his for a 
model. 

^ As instances we give — multo maxime miserabile (Cat. 36), incultus, {ts 
(54), ■iieglegisset (Jug. 40), discordicms {Q^\ &c. Poetical constructions are 



i 



SALLUST. 205 

Kepos, and resembles more than any other that of Tacitus. Its 
brevity rarely falls into obscuriry, though it sometimes borders on 
affectation. There is an appearance as if he was never satisfied, 
but always straining after an excellence beyond his powers. It 
is emphatically a cultured style, and, as such often recalls older 
authors. Now it is a reminiscence of Homer : aliud clausum in 
pedore, aliud in lingua jpromptum habere;'^ now of a Latin 
tragedian : secundae res sapientium animos fatigant. Much allow- 
ance must be made for Sallust's defects, when we remember that 
no model of historical writing yet existed at Eome. Some of the 
aphorisms which are scattered in his book are wonderfully con- 
densed, and have passed into proverbs. Concordia parvae res 
crescunt from the lugurtha ; and idem velle, idem nolle, ea demum 
firma amicitia est, from the Catiline, are instances familiar to all. 
The prose of Sallust differs from that of Cicero in being less 
rhythmical; the hexametrical ending which the orator rightly 
rejects, is in him not infrequent. It is probably a concession to 
Greek habit.2 Sallust did good service in pointing out what his- 
torical -writing should be, and his example was of such service to 
Livy that, had it not been for him, it is possible the great master- 
history would never have been designed. 

It does not appear that this period was fruitful in historians. 
Tubero (49-47 B.C.) is the only other whose works are men 
tioned ; the convulsions of the state, the short but sullen repose, 
broken by Caesar's death (44 B.C.), the bloodthirsty sway of the 
triumvirs, and the contests which ended in the final overthroAv at 
Actium (31 B.C.), were not favourable to historical enterprise. Eut 
private notes were carefidly kept, and men's memories were 
strengthened by silence, so that circumstances naturally inculcated, 
waiting in patience until the time for speaking out should have 
arrived.^ 

— Inf. for gerund, often ; pleraque nohilitas for maxima pars noUlium (Cat. 
17). For asyndeton cf. Cat. 5, et saepiss. 

1 Cat. 1 0. The well-knownjline os %' '^Tepov fiev k^vQoi h\ <l>pea]v, dWo 54 
pdCoi, is the original. 

2 lb, i. 1, virtus clara aeternaque Jiahdur ; ohcdientia finxit. 

8 It should perhaps be noticed that many MSS. spell the name Salustiua. 



206 



HISTORY OF ROMAN" LITERATURE, 



On the Acta Diurna and Acta Senatus, 



It is well known that there was a 
sort of journal at Rome analogous, 
perhaps, to our Gazette, but its nature 
and origin are somewhat uncertain. 
Suetonius (Caes. 20) has this account : 
' ' Inito honore, prirmis omnium insti- 
tuit, ut tam Senatus quam popuh di- 
urna acta conficerentur et publicaren- 
tur,^' which seems naturally to imply 
that the people's acta had been pub- 
lished every day before Caesar's consul- 
ship, and that he did the same thing 
for the acta of the senate. Before 
investigating these we must distin- 
guish them from certain other acta: — 
(1) Civilia, containing a register of 
births, deaths, marriages, and divor- 
ces, called airoypacpal by Polybius, and 
alluded to by Cicero {adFam. viii. 7) 
and others. These were at first in- 
trusted to the care of the censors, 
afterwards to the praefecti aerarii, (2) 
Forensia, comprising lists of laws, 
plebiscites, elections of aediles, tri- 
bunes, &c. like the ^r)ix6<Tia ypdjjLfjLaTa 
at Athens, placed among the archives 
annexed to various temples, especially 
that of Saturn. (3) ludiciaria, the 
legal reports, often called gesta, kept 
in a special tahularium, under the 
charge of military men discharged 
from active service. (4) 3Iilitaria, 
which contained reports of all the men 
employed in war, their height, age, 
conduct, accomplishments, &c. These 
were entrusted to an officer called lih- 
rarius legionis (Veg. ii. 19), or some- 
times tabularius castrensis, but so only 
in the later Latin. Other less strictly 
formal documents, as lists of cases, 
precedents, &c. seem to have been also 
called acta, but the above are the 
regular kinds. 

The Acta Senatus or deliberations of 
the senate were not published until 
Caesar. They were kept jealously 
secret, as is proved by a quaint story 
by Cato, quoted in Aulus Gellius (i. 
23). At all important deliberations 
a senator, usually the praetor as being ! 



one of the junior members, acted as 
secretary. In the imperial times this 
functionary was always a confidant of 
the emperor. The acta were soaio- 
times inscribed on tabulae publicae 
(Cic. pro Sull. 14, 15), but only on 
occasions when it was held expedient 
to make them known. As a rule the 
publication of the resolution {Senatus 
Consultum) was the first intimation 
the people had of the decisions of their 
rulers. In the times of the emperors 
there were also acta of each emperor, 
apparently the memoranda of statd 
councils held by him, and communi- 
cated to the senate for them to act 
upon. There appears also to have 
been acta of private families when the 
estates were large enough to make it 
worth while to keep them. These are 
alluded to in Petronius Arbiter (ch. 
53). We are now come to the Acta 
Diurna, Populi, Urbana or Publican 
by all which names the same thing is 
meant. The earliest allusion to them 
is in a passage of Sempronius Asellio, 
who distinguishes the annals from the 
diaria, which the Greeks call i(pr)fiepl5 
(ap. A. Cell. V. 18). When about 
the year 131 B.C. the Annates were 
redacted into a complete form, the 
cu:ta probably begun. When Servius 
(ad. Aen. i. 373) says ihdit the Annates 
registered each day all noteworthy 
events that had occurred, he is ap- 
parently confounding them with the 
acta, which seem to have quietly 
taken their place. During the time 
that Cicero was absent in Cilicia (62 
B.C.) he received the news of town 
from his friend Coelius (Cic. Fam. 
viii. 1, 8, 12, &c.). These news com- 
prised all the topics which we should 
find now-a-days in a daily paper. As- 
conius Pedianus, a commentator on 
Cicero of the time of Claudius, in his 
notes on the Milo (p. 47, ed. Orell. 
1833), quotes several passages from 
the acta, on the authority of which 
he bases some of his arguments. 



ACTA DIURNA. 



207 



Among them are analyses of forensic 
orations, political and judicial; and 
it is therefore probable that these 
formed a regular portion of the daily 
journal in the latest age of the Re- 
public. When Antony offered Caesar 
a crown on the feast of the Lupercalia, 
Caesar ordered it to be noted in the 
acta (Dio xliv. 11); Antony, as we 
know fi-om Cicero, even entered the 
fact in \\\Q Fasti, or religious calendar. 
Augustus continued the publication of 
the Acta Fopuli, under certain limita- 
tions, analogous to the control exer- 
cised over journalism by the govern- 



ments of modem Europe ; but he in- 
terdicted that of the Acta Senatus 
(Suet. Aug. 36). Later emperors 
abridged even this liberty. A portico 
in Rome having been in danger of fall- 
ing and shored up by a skilful archi- 
tect, Tiberius forbade the publication 
of his name (Dio Ivii. 21). Nero re- 
laxed the supervision of the press, but 
it was afterwards re-established. For 
the genuine fragments of the Acta, see 
the treatise by Vict, Le Clerc, sur les 
journaux ckez les Romains, from 
which this notice is taken. 



CHAPTER IV* 

The History of Poetry to the Close of the Kepublio— ' 
KisE OP Alexandrinism — Lucretius — Catullus. 

As long as the drama was cultivated poetry had not ceased to he 
popular in its tone. But we have already mentioned that coinci- 
dentally with the rise of Sulla dramatic productiveness ceased. 
We hear, indeed, that J. Caesar Strabo (about 90 b.c.) wrote 
tragedies, but they were probably never performed. Comedy, as 
hitherto practised, was almost equally mute. The only forms 
that lingered on were the Atellanae, and those few plebeian types 
of comedy known as Togata and Tahernaria. But even these 
had now withered. The present epoch brings before us a fresh 
type of composition in the Mime, which now first took a literary 
shape. Mimes had indeed existed in some sort from a very early 
period, but no art had been applied to their cultivation, and 
they had held a position much inferior to that of the national 
farce. But several circumstances now conspired to bring then; 
into greater prominence. First, the great increase of luxury and 
show, and with it the appetite for the gaudy trappings of the 

fedacle; secondly, the failure of legitimate drama, and the fact 
at the Atellanae, with their patrician surroundings, were only 
half popular; and lastly, the familiarity with the different offshoots 
of Greek comedy, thrown out in rank profusion at Alexandria, 
and capable of assimilation with the plastic materials of the Mimus. 
These worthless products, issued under the names of Ehinthon, 
Sopater, Sciras, and Timon, were conspicuous for the entire 
absence of restraint with which they treated serious subjects, as 
well as for a merry-andrew style of humour easily naturalised, if 
it were not abeady present, among the huge concourse of idlers 
who came to sate their appetite for indecency without altogether 
sacrificing the pretence of a dramatic spectacle. Two things 
marked off the Mimus from the Atellana or national farce ; the 
players appeared without masks, ^ and women were allowed to act. 
^ The actors in the Atellanae not only wore masks but had the privilege 



THE MIMES. 209 

This opened tlie gates to licentiousness. We find from Cicer© 
that Mimae bore a disreputable character,^ but from their personal 
charms and accomplishments often became the chosen companions 
of the profligate nobles of the day. Under the Empire this was 
still more the case. Kingsley, in his Ilypatia, has given a lifelike 
sketch of one of these elegant but dissolute females. To these 
seductive innovations the Mime added some conservative features. 
It absorbed many characteristics of legitimate comedy. The actors 
were not necessarily planijpedes in fact, though they remained so 
in name; 2 they might wear the soccus^ and the Greek dress^ of the 
higher comedy. The Mimes seem to have formed at this time 
interludes between the acts of a regular drama. Hence they were 
at once simple and short, seasoned with as many coarse jests as 
could be crowded into a limited compass, with plenty of music, 
dancing, and expressive gesture-language. Their plot was always 
the same, and never failed to please; it struck the key-note of all 
decaying societies, the discomfiture of the husband by the wife.^ 
^Nevertheless, popular as was the Mime, it was, even in Caesar's 
time, obliged to share the palm of attractiveness with bear-fights, 
boxing matches, processions of strange beasts, foreign treasures, 
captives of uncouth aspect, and other curiosities, which passed 
sometimes for hours across the stage, feeding the gaze of an 
unlettered crowd, to the utter exclusion of drama and interlude 
alike. Thirty years later, Horace^ declares that against such com- 
petitors no play could get a silent hearing. 

of refusing to take them off if they acted badly, which was the "penalty 
exacted from those actors in the legitimate drama who failed to satisfy their 
^audience. Masks do not appear to have been used even in the drama until 
about 100 B.C. 

^ Second Philippic. * Planipcdes audit Fdbios. Juv. viii. 190. 

3 " C>r Jonsons learned sock he onJ" Milton here adopts the Latin synonyms 
for comedy. ^ The Pallium. This, of course, was not always worn. 

fi Ovid's account of the Mimus is drawn to the life, and is instructive as 
showing the moral food provided for the people under the paternal govern- 
ment of the emperors (Tr. ii. 497). As an excuse for his own free language 
he says, Quid si scrijjsissiin Mivios obscaena iocantes Qui semper vetiti criynen 
avioris habent; In quibus assidue cultus proccdit adulter, Verbaq^ie dat stulto 
callida nuiita viro ? Nubilis haec virgo, matronaque, vlrque, yxicrque SjJcctat, 
et ex tnagna parte Scnatus adest. Nee satis inccslis temerari vocihus aures; 
Assuescunt oculi multa pudenda pati . . . Quo mimis prodest, scaena est 
lucrosa poctac, &c. The laxity of the modem ballet is a faint shadow of the 
indecency of the Mime. 

^ The passage is as follows (Ep. ii. 1, 185): Media inter carmina poscunt 
A%it ursitm aut pnigiles : his nam 2Jlebec7cIa plaudit. Verum eqidtis quoqite 
iam miravit ah aure voluptas Omnis ad incertos oculos . . . CaiMvum por^ 
tatorebur, captiva Corinthv^ : Esseda festinant, pileoita, petorrita, naves . . . 
Rideret Democritus, et . . . spectaret popidum ludis attentius ipsis Ut sibi 

O 



210 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

This being tlie lamentalDle state of things, we are surprised to 
find that Mime writing was practised by two men of vigorous 
talent and philosophic culture, whose fragments, so far from 
betraying any concession to the prevailing depravity, are above the 
ordinary tone of ancient comic morality. They are the knight 
T>. Labrrius (106-43 b.c.) and Publilids Syrus (fl. 44 b.c.), ar. 
enfranchised Spian slave. It is probable that Caesar lent his 
countenance to these writers in the hope of raising their art. His 
patronage was valuable; but he put a great indignity (45 b.c.) on 
Laberius. The old man, for he was then sixty years of age, had 
written Mimes for a generation, but had never acted in them him- 
self. Caesar, whom he may have offended by indiscreet allusions,^ 
recommended him to appear in person against his rival Syrus. 
This recommendation, as he well knew, was equivalent to a 
command. In the prologue he expresses his sense of the 
affront with great manliness and force of language. We quote 
some lines from it, as a specimen of the best plebeian Latin ; 

*' Necessitas, cuius cursus, transversi impetum 
Yoluerunt multi effugere, pauci potuerunt, 
Quo me detrusit paene extremis sensibus? 
Quem nulla ambitio, nulla unquam largitio, 
NuUus timor, vis nulla, nulla auctoritas 
Movere potuit in iuventa de statu, 
Ecce in senecta ut facile labefecit loco 
Viri excellentis niente clemente edita 
Summissa placide blandiloquens oratiof 
Et enim ipsi di negare cui nil potuerunt, 
Hominem me denegare quis posset pati? 
Ego bis tricenis actis annis sine nota, 
Eques Romanus e lare egressus nieo, 
Domum reverter mimus — ni mirum hoc die 
Uno plus vixi mihi quam vivendum fuit. 

Porro, Quirites, libertatem perdimus." ^ 
In these noble lines we see the native eloquence of a free spirit 
But the poet's wrathful muse roused itself in vam. Caesar 
awarded the prize to Syrus, saying to Laberius in an impromptu 
verse of polite condescension, 

*' Favente tibi me victus, Laberi, es a Syro."^ 

From this time the old knight surrendered the stage to his 
younger and more polished rival. 

2>raehentcm mimo spedacula vhira, etc. From certain remarks in Cicero we 
gather that things were not much better even in his day. 

1 This is what Gellius (xvii. 14, 2) says. 
" 2 The whole is preserved, Macrob. S. ii. 7, and is well worth readin*. 

3 Cic. ad Att. xii. 18. 



THE MIMES. 211 

Synis was a native of Antiocli, and remarkable from his child- 
hood for the beauty of his person and his sparlding wit, to which he 
owed his freedom. His talent soon raised him to eminence as an 
improvisatore and dramatic declaimer. He trusted mostly to 
extempore inspiration when acting his Mimes, but wrote certain 
episodes where it was necessary to do so. His works abounded 
•>;\dth moral apophthegms, tersely expressed. We possess 857 
verses, arranged in alphabetical order, ascribed to him, of which 
perhaps half are genuine. This collection was made early in the 
Middle Ages, when it was much used for purposes of education. 
We append a few examples of these sayings : ^ 

" Beneficium dando accipit, qui digno dedit." 

** Furor fit laesa saepius patientia." 

" Comes facundus in via pro vehiculo est.'* 

" Niminm altercando Veritas amittitur.** 

** Iniuriarum remedium est oblivio." 

** Malum est consilium quod mutarinon potest.** 

" Nunquani periclum sine periclo vincitur. '* 

Horace mentions Laberius not uncomplimentarily, though he pro- 
fesses no interest in the sort of composition he represented. ^ 
Perhaps he judged him by his audience. Besides these two men, 
Cn. I^Iatius (about 44 B.C.) also wrote Mvmiainbi about the same 
date. They are described as Mimicae fdbulae, verslbiLs plerunque 
iamhicis conscriptae,^ and appear to have differed in some way 
from the actual mimes, probably in not being represented on the 
stage. They reappear in the time of Pliny, whose friend 
Yergixius Eomanus (he tells ns in one of his letters*) wrote 
Mimiambi tenuiter, argute, venuste, et in hoc genere eloquentissime. 
This shows that for a long time a certain refinement and elabora- 
tion was compatible with the style of Mime writing. ^ 

The Panto7aimi have been confused ^dth the Mimi ; but they 
differed in being dancers, not actors ; they represent the inevitable 
development of the mimic art, which, as Ovid says in his 
Trlsiia,^ even in its earlier manifestations, enlisted the eye as 
much as the ear. In Imperial times they almost engrossed the 
stage. Pylades and Bathyllus are monuments of a depraved 
taste, which could raise these men to offices of state, and seek 

^ See A])p. note 2, for more about Syrus. 

2 Hor. Sat. i, x. 6, where he compares liim to Lucilius. 

3 Examples quoted by Gellius, x. 24 ; xv. 25. * vi. 21. 

^ We should infer this also from allusions to Pythagorean tenets, and 
other philosophical questions, which occur in the extant fragments of 
Mimes. 6 Tr. 11. 603, 4. 



212 HISTORY OF KOMAN LITERATURE. 

their society with sucli zeal tliat tlie emperors were compelled 
to issue stringent enactments to forbid it. Tigellius seems to 
have been the first of these effeminati; he is satirised by Horace,^ 
but his influence was inappreciable compared with that of his 
successors. The pantomimus aspired to render the emotions of 
terror or love more speakingly by gesture than it was possible 
to do by speech; and ancient critics, while deploring, seem to 
have admitted this claim. The moral effect of such exhibitions 
may be imagined. ^ 

It is pleasing to find that in Cicero's time the interpretation of 
the great dramatists' conceptions exercised the talents of several 
illustrious actors, the two best-known of whom are Aesopus, the 
tragedian (12 2-54 B.C.), and Eoscius, the comic actor (1 20-6 l'?B.c.),^ 
After the exhaustion of dramatic creativeness a period of splendid 
representation naturally follows. It was so in Germany and Eng- 
land, it was so at Eome. Of the two men, Eoscius was the 
greater m-aster ; he was so perfect in his art that his name became 
a synonym for excellence in any branch.* Neither of them, how- 
ever, embraced, as Garrick did, both departments of the art ; their 
provinces were and always remained distinct. Eoth had the privi- 
lege of Cicero's friendship ; both no doubt lent him the benefit of 
their professional advice. The interchange of hints between an 
orator and an actor was not unexampled. When Hortensius 
spoke, Eoscius always attended to study his suggestive gestures, 
and it is told of Cicero himself that he and Eoscius strove which 
could express the higher emotions more perfectly by his art. 
Eoscius was a native of Solonium, a Latin town, his praenomen 
was Quintus ; Aesopus appears to have been a freedman of the 
Claudia gens. Of other actors few were well-known enough to 
merit notice. Some imagine Dossennus, mentioned by Horace,^ 
to have been an actor; but he is much more likely to be the 
Fabius Dossennus quoted as an author of Atellanae by Pliny in 
his Natural History.^ The freedom with which popular actors 
were allowed to treat their original is shown by Aesopus on one 

1 S. 1-3, et al. 

2 Veil. Pat, ii. 83, where Plancus dancing the character of Glaucus is 
described, cf. Juv. vi. 63. 

^ Quae gravis Aesopus, quae doctus Eoscius egit (Ep. ii. 1, 82). Qiiintilian 
(List. Or. xi. 3) says, Eoscius citatior, Aesopus gravior fuit, quod ille comae' 
dias, liic tragocdias egit. 

^ CiC: de dr. i. 28, 130. As Cicero in his oration for Sextins mentions the 
expression of Aesopus's eyes and face while acting, it is supposed that he did 
not always wear a mask. 

5 Ep. ii. 1, 173. 

^ xiv, 15, Others again think the name expresses one of the standing 
characters of the Atellanae, hke the Maccus, etc. 



POETRY OF CICERO AND CAESAR. 1213 

occasion (62 b.c. 1) changing the words Bnttus qui patnam staiili- 
verat to TulliuSj a change which, falling in with the people's 
humour at the moment, was vociferously applauded, and gratified 
Cicero's vanity not a little.^ Aesopus died soon after (54 B.C.) j 
Eoscius did not live so long. His marvellous beauty when a youth 
is the subject of a fine epigram by Lutatius Catulus, already 
referred to.^ Both amassed large fortunes, and lived in princely 
style. 

While the stage was given up to Mimes, cultured men wrote 
tragedies for their improvement in command of language. Both 
Cicero and his brother wrought assiduously at these frigid imita- 
tions. Caesar followed in their steps ; and no doubt the practice 
was conducive to copiousness and to an effective simulation of 
passion. Their appearance as orators before the people must have 
called out such difierent mental qualities from their cold and cal- 
culating intercourse with one another, that tragedy writing as well 
as declaiming may have been needful to keep themselves ready 
for an emergency. Cicero, as is well known, tried hard to gain 
fame as a poet. The ridicule which all ages have lavished on his 
unhappy eff'orts has been a severe punishment for his want of 
self-knowledge. Still, judging from the verses that remain, we 
cannot deny him the praise of a correct and elegant versateur. 
Besides several translations from Homer and Euripides scattered 
through his works, and a few quotations by hostile critics from 
his epic attempts,^ we possess a large part of his translation of 
Aratus's Phaenomena, written, indeed, in his early days, but a 
graceful specimen of Latin verse, and, as Munro* has shown, 
carefully studied and often imitated by Lucretius. The most 
noticeable point of metre is his disregard of the final s, no less 
than thrice in the first ninety lines, a practice which in later life 
he stigmatised as suhrusticum. In other respects his hexameters 
are a decided advance on those of Ennius in point of smoothness 
though not of strength. He still affects Greek caesuras which are 
not suited to the Latin cadence,^ and his rhythm generally lacks 
variety. 

' Pro Sext. 58. ^ ggg Book i. chapter viii. 

2 These were doubtless much the worst of his poetical effusions. It was 
in them that the much-abased lines Ofortunam natam me Oonsule Roinairiy 
and Cedant arma togae, concedat laurca laudi, occurred. See Forsyth, Vit. 
Cic. p. 10, 11, His gesta Marii was the tribute of an admiring fellow- 
townsman. ■* In the preface to his Lucrcti'as. 

^ E.g. Inferior paulo est Aries ei flumcn ad Austri Inclinatior. Atqvs 
etiam, etc. v. 77 ; and he gives countless examples of that break after the 
fourth foot which Lucretius also afi'ects, e.g. Arcturus nomine claro. Two or 
three lines are imitated by Virgil, e.g. v. 1, ah Jure Musarum primordia j so 



214 HISTORY OF KOMAN LITERATURE. 

Caesar's pen was nearly as prolific. He wrote besides an Oedipui 
a poem called Laudes Hercidis, and a metrical account of a journey 
into Spain called Iter,^ Sportive effusions on various plants are 
attributed to him by Pliny. 2 All these Augustus wisely refused 
to publish; but there remain two excellent epigrams, one on 
Terence, already alluded to, which is undoubtedly genuine,^ the 
other probably so, though others ascribe it to Germanicus or Domi- 
tian.* But the rhythm, purity of language, and continuous 
structure of the couplets seem to point, indisputably tD an earlier 
age. It is as follows — 

"Thrax puer, astricto glacie dum ludit in Hebro, 
Frigore concretas pondore rupit aquas. 
Quurnqne imae partes rapido traherentur ab amne, 

Abscidit, heu ! teneruiri hibrica testa caput. 
Orba quod inventum mater dum conderet urn a, 
'Hoc peperi flammis, cetera,' dixit, 'aquis.'" 

This is evidently a study from the Greek, probably from an 
Alexandrine writer. 

"We have already had occasion more than once to mention the 
influence of Alexandria on Eoman literature. Since the fall of 
Carthage Ec;me had had much intercourse with the capital of the 
Greek world. Ilor thought, erudition, and style, had acted 
strongly upon the rude imitators of Greek refinement. But 
hitherto the liomans had not been ripe for receiving their influ- 
ence in full. In Cicero's time, however, and in a great measure 
owing to his labours, Latin composition of aU kinds had advanced 
so far that writers, and especially poets, began to feel capable of 
rivalling their Alexandrian models. This type of Hellenism was 
so eminently suited to Eoman comprehension that, once introduced, 
it could not fail to produce striking results. The results it 
actually produced were so vast, and in a way so successful, that 
we must pause a moment to contemplate the rise of the city which 
was connected with them. 

Alexander did not err in selecting the mouth of the Nile for 
the capital that should perpetuate his name. Its site, its asso- 
ciations, rehgious, artistic, and scientific, and the tide of commerce 
that was certain to flow through it, all suggested the coast of 
Egypt as the fittest point of attraction for the industry of the 
Eastern world, while the rapid fall of the other kingdoms that 

V. 21, ohstipum caput et tereti cervice reflexum. The rhythm of v. 3, cum 
caeloque simul nocfesque diesque f&runtur, suggests a well-known line in the 
eighth Aeneid, olli remigio noctemque diemque fatigant. 

^ Suet. J. C. 56. 2 i^, H. xix. 7. ^ guet. vit. Ter. see page 51. 

* See Bernbaidy Grundr. der R. L. Anm, 200, also Caes. Op. od. S. 
Clarke, 1778. 



ALEXANDRIA. 215 

rose from tlie ruins of his Empire contributed to make tlie new 
Merchant City the natural inheritor of his great ideas. The 
Ptolemies well fulfilled the task which Alexander's foresight had 
set before them. They asj)ired to make their capital the centre 
not only of commercial but of intellectual production, and the 
repository of all that was most venerable in religion, Hterature, 
and art. To achieve this end, they acted with the magnificence 
as well as the unscrupulousness of great monarchs. At their com- 
mand, a princely city rose from the sandhills and rushes of the 
Canopic mouth ; stately temples uniting Greek proportion Avith 
Egyptian grandeur, long quays with sheltered docks, ingenious 
contrivances for purifying the Mle water and conducting a supply 
to every considerable house ;i in short, every product of a luxu- 
rious civilisation was found there, except the refreshing shade of 
green trees, which, beyond a few of the commoner kinds, could 
not be forced to grow on the shifting sandy soil. The great 
glory of Alexandria, however, was its public library. EouRded 
by Soter (306-285 B.C.), greatly extended by Philadelphus 
(285-247 B.C.), under whom grammatical studies attained their 
highest development, enriched by Euergetes (247-212 B.C.) with 
genuine MSS. of authors fraudulently obtained from their owners 
to whom he sent back copies made by his o^vn librarians, ^ this 
collection reached under the last-named sovereign the enormous 
total of 532,800 volumes, of which the great majority were kept 
in the museum which formed part of the royal palace, and about 
50,000 of the most precious in the temple of Serapis, the patron 
deity of the city.^ Connected with the museum were various 
endowments analogous to our professorships and fellowships of 
colleges ; under the Ptolemies the head librarian, in after times 
the professor of rhetoric, held the highest post within this ancient 
university. The librarian was usually chief priest of one of the 
greatest gods, Isis, Osiris, or Serapis.* His appointment was for 
life, and lay at the disposal of the monarch. Thus the museum 
was essentially a court institution, and its savants and littera- 
teurs were accomplished courtiers and men of the world. Learn- 
ing being thus nursed as in a hot-bed, its products were rank, 

1 De Bell. Alex. 4. 

2 Whenever a ship touched at Alexandria, Euergetes sent for any MSS. 
the captain might have on board. These were detained in the museum and 
labelled rh e/c roiv irXoitav. 

2 The museum was situated in the CLiiarter of the city called Brueheium 
(Spartian. in Hadr. 20). Kee Don. and Miiller, Hist. Gk. Lit. vol. ii. 
chap. 45. 

* The school of Alexandria did not become a reliccious centre until a later 
date. The priestly functions of the librarians are historically unimportant. 



216 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

but neither hardy nor natural. They took the form of recondite 
mythological erudition, grammar and exegesis, and laborious 
imitation of the ancients. In science only was there a healthy 
spirit of research. Mathematics were splendidly represented by 
Euclid and Archimedes, Geography by Eratosthenes, Astronomy 
by Hipparchus ; for these men, though not all residents in Alex- 
andria, all gained their principles and method from study within 
her walls. To Aristarchus (fl. 180 B.C.) and his contempo- 
raries we owe the final revision of the Greek classic texts ; and 
the service thus done to scholarship and literature was incalculable. 
But the earher Alexandrines seem to have been overwhelmed by 
the vastness of material at their command. Except in pastoral 
poetry, which in reality was not Alexandrine,^ there was no crea- 
tive talent shown for centuries. The true importance of Alexan- 
dria in the history of thought dates from Plotinus (about 200 a.d.), 
who first clearly taught that mystic philosophy which under the 
name of Neoplatonism, has had so enduring a fascination for the 
human spirit. It was not, however, for philosophy, science, 
or theology that the Eonians went to Alexandria. It was for 
literary models which should less hopelessly defy imitation than 
those of old Greece, and for general views of life which should 
approve themselves to their growing enlightenment. These they 
found in the haK-Greek, haK-cosmopolitan culture which had 
there taken root and spread widely in the East. Even before 
Alexander's death there had been signs of the internal break-up 
of Hellenism, now that it had attained its perfect development. 
Out of Athens pure Hellenism had at no time been able to 
express itself successfully in literature. And even in Athens the 
burden of Atticism, if we may say so, seems to have become too 
great to bear. We see a desire to emancipate both thought and 
expression from the exquisite but confining proportions within 
which they had as yet moved. The student of Euripides observes 
a struggle, ineffectual it is true, but pregnant with meaning, 
against all that is most specially recognised as conservative and 
national. 2 He strives to pour new wine into old bottles ; but in 
this case the bottles are too strong for him to burst. The Atticism 
which had guided and comprehended, now began to cramp deve- 
lopment. To make a world-wide out of a Hellenic form of thought 

^ It is true Theocritus stayed long in Alexandria. But his inspiration is 
altogether Sicilian, and as such was hailed by delight by the Alexandrines, 
who were tired of pedantry and compliment, and longed for naturalness 
though in a rustic garb. 

2 This is the true ground of Aristophane's rooted antipathy to Euripides. 
The two minds were of an incompatible order. Aristophanes represents 
Athens; Euripides the human spirit. 



ALEXANDRIA. 217 

it i3 necessary to go outside the charmed soil of Greece. Only on 
the banks of the !N^ile will the new culture find a shrine, whose re- 
mote and mysterious authority frees it from the spell of Hellenism, 
now no longer the exponent of the world's thought, while it is near 
enough to the arena where human progress is fighting its way 
onward, to inspire and be inspired by the mighty nation that is 
succeeding Greece as the representative of mankind. 

The contribution of Alexandria to human progress consists, then, 
in its recoil from Greek exclusiveness, in its sifting of wiiat was 
universal in Greek thought from what was national, and present- 
ing the former in a systematised form for the enlightenment of 
those who received it. This is its nobler side ; the side which 
men like Ennius and Scipio seized, and welded into a harmonious 
union with the higher national tradition of Eome, out of which 
union arose that complex product to which the name humanitas 
was so happily o-iven. But Alexandrian culture was more than 
cosmopolitan. It was in a sense anti-national. Egyptian super- 
stition, theurgy, magic, and charlatanism of every sort, tried to 
amalgamate with the imported Greek culture. In Greece itself 
they had never done this. The clear light of Greek intellect had 
no fellowship with the obscure or the mysterious. It drove them 
into corners and let them mutter in secret. Eut the moment the 
lamp of culture was given into other hands, they started up again 
unabashed and undismayed. The Alexandrine thinkers struggled 
to make Greek influences supreme, to exclude altogether those of 
the East ; and their efforts were for three centuries successful : 
neither mysticism nor magic reigned in the museum of the 
Ptolemies. But this victory was purchased at a severe cost. The 
enthusiasm of the Alexandrian scholars had made them pedants. 
They gi'adually ceased to care for the thought of literature, and 
busied themselves only with questions of learning and of form. 
Their multifarious reading made them think that they too had a 
literary gift. Philetas was not only a profound logician, but he 
affected to be an amatory poet. ^ Callimachus, the brilliant and 
courtly librarian of Philadelphus, wrote nearly every kind of 
poetry that existed. Aratus treated the abstruse investigations of 
Eudoxus in neat verses that at once became popular. While in 
the great periods of Greek art each writer had been content to 
excel in a single branch, it now became the fashion for the same 
poet to be Epicist, Lyrist, and Elegy-writer at once. 

1 He must have had some real beauties, else Theocritus (vii. 40) would 
hardly praise him so highly: *' ou ydp ttw kot' ifihu v6ov ov^\ rhv icrXhv 
2t/ceA.iSaj/ i/i/fTj/xt rhv itt 'S.dfj.w ovSe *tA7]TOi' Aeidwv, fidrpaxos Se ttot dicpiBas 
us Tis Cpiaocti. 



i 



218 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

Besides the new treatment of old forms, tliere were three kinds 

of poetry, first developed or perfected at Alexandria, avhich have 
special interest for us from the great celebrity they gained when 
imported into Eome. They are the didactic poem, the erotic elegy, 
and the epigram. The maxim of Callimachus (characteristic as it 
is of his narrow mind) /xeya ^l/^Xlov fxiya Ka/cov, "a great book is a 
great evil,"i was the rule on which these poetasters generally acted. 
The didactic poem is an illegitimate cross between science and 
poetry. In the creative days of Greece it had no place. Hesiod, 
Parmenides, and Empedocles were, indeed, cited as examples. But 
in their days poetry was the only vehicle of literary effort, and he 
who wished to issue accurate information was driven to embody 
it in verse. In the time of the Ptolemies things were altogether 
different. It was consistent neither with the exactness of science 
nor with the grace of the Muses to treat astronomy or geography 
as subjects for poetry. Still, the best masters of this style 
undoubtedly attained great renown, and have found brilliant 
imitators, not only in Poman, but in modern times. 

AuATUS (280 B.C.), known as the model of Cicero's, and in a 
later age of Domitian's^ youthful essays in verse, was born at Soli 
in Cilicia about three hundred years before Christ. He was not 
a scientific man,^ but popularised in hexameter verse the astrono- 
mical works of Eudoxus, of which he formed two poems, the 
Phaenomena and the Diosemia^ or Prognostics. These were 
extravagantly praised, and so far took the place of their original 
that commentaries were written on them by learned men,^ while 
the works of Eudoxus were in danger of being forgotten. Nican- 
DER (230 B.C. f), stUl less ambitious, wrote a poem on remedies for 
vegetable and mineral poisons (aX^^t^apixaKo), and for the bites 
of beasts (BrjpLaKa), and another on the habits of birds (opvcOoyovLa). 
These attracted the imitation of Macer in the Augustan age. But 
the most celebrated poets were Callimachus (260 b.c.) and Phile- 
TAS^ (280 B.C.), who formed the models of Propertius. To them 
we owe the Erotic Elegy, whether personal or mythological, and 

^ Even an epic poem was, if it extended to any length, now considered 
tedious ; 'EirvWta, or miniature epics, in one, two, or three books, became the 
fashion. 

2 Others assign the poem which has come down to us to Germanicus the 
father of Caligula, peihaps with better reason. 

3 Cic. De Or. xvi. 69. 

* Ovid (Amor, i, 15, 16) expresses the high estimate of Aratus common 
in his day : Abulia Sophodeo veniet iadura cothurno . Cum sole et luna 
se')iix>er Aratus erit. He was not, strictly speaking, an Alexandrinu, as he 
lived at the court of Antigonus in Macedonia ; but he represents tlie same 
Bfiiool of thought. 

^ They are generally mentioned together. Prop IV. i 1, &c. 



ALEXANDRIA. 219 

all tlie pedantic ornament of fictitious passion whicli such, writings 
generally display. More will be said about them when we come 
to the elegiac poets. Callimachus, hoAvever, seems to have carried 
his art, such as it was, to perfection. He is generally considered 
the prince of elegists, and his extant fragments show great nicety 
and finish of expression. The sacriligious theft of the locks of 
Berenice's hair from the temple where she had offered them, was a 
subject too well suited to a courtier's muse to escape treatment. 
Its celebrity is due to the translation made by Catullus, and the 
appropriation of the idea by Pope in his Rajje of the Loch. The 
short epigram was also much in vogue at Alexandria, and neat 
examples abound in the Anthology. But in all these departments 
the Eomans imitated with such zest and vigour that they left 
their masters far behind. Ovid and Martial are as superior in , 
their way to Philetas and Callimachus as Lucretius and Virgil to 
Aratus and Apollonius Ehodius. This last-mentioned poet, Apoi> 
LONius Ehodius (fl. 240 e.g.), demands a short notice. He was 
the pupil of Callimachus, and the most genuinely-gifted of all the 
Alexandrine school ; he incurred the envy and afterwards the 
rancorous hatred of his preceptor, through whose influence he was 
obliged to leave Alexandria and seek fame at Ehodes. Here he 
remained all his life and wrote his most celebrated poem, the Epic 
of the Argonauts, a combination of sentiment, learning, and grace- 
ful expression, which is less known than it ought to be. Its chief 
interest to us is the use made of it by Virgil, who studied it deeply 
and drew much from it. We observe the passion of love as a 
new element in heroic poetry, scarcely treated in Greece, but 
henceforth to become second to none in prominence, and through 
Dido, to secure a place among the very highest flights of song.^ 
Jason and Medea, the nero and heroine, who love one another, 
create a poetical era. An epicist of even greater popularity was 
EuPHOEioN of Chalcis (274-203 e.g.), whose afi'ected prettiness 
and rounded cadences charmed the ears of the young nobles. He 
had admirers who knew him by heart, who declaimed him at the 
baths, 2 and quoted his pathetic passages ad nauseum. He was 
the inventor of the historical romance in verse, of which Eome 
was so fruitful. A Lucan, a Silius, owe their inspiration in part 
to him. Lastly, we may mention that the drama could find no. 

''■ Nothing can show this more strikingly than the fact that the Puritan 
Milton introduces the loves of Adam and Eve in the central part of his 
poem. 

2 The Cantores Euphorionis and despisers of Ennius, with whom Cicero 
was greatly wroth. Alluding to them he says : — Ita belle nobis " Elavil 
ab Epiro lenissimus Onchesmites." Ilicnc o-rrovS€idCoyTa si cui vis rm 
vecoTepuv 2^0 ttco vendita. Ad. Att. vii. 2, 1. 



220 HISTORY OF KOMA.N LITERATURE. 

place at Alexandria. Only learned compilations of recondite 
legend and frigid declamation, almost unintelligible from the rare 
and obsolete words with which they were crowded, were sent 
forth under the name of plays. The Cassandra or Alexandra of 
Lycophron is the only specimen that has come to us. Its thorny 
difficulties deter the reader, but Fox speaks of it as breathing a 
rich vein of melancholy. The Thyestes of Varius and the Medea 
of Ovid were no doubt greatly improved copies of dramas of this 
sort. 

It wiU be seen from this survey of Alexandrine letters that the 
better side of their influence was soon exhausted. Any breadth 
of view they possessed was seized and far exceeded by the nobler 
minds that imitated it ; and all their other qualities were such as 
to enervate rather than inspire. The masculine rudeness of the 
old poets now gave way to pretty finish ; verbal conceits took the 
place of condensed thoughts ; the rich exuberance of the native 
style tried to cramp itseK into the arid allusiveness which, instead 
of painting straight from nature, was content to awaken a long 
line of literary associations. Nevertheless there was much in their 
manipulation of language from which the Eomans could learn a 
useful lesson. It was impossible for them to catch the original 
impulse of the divine seer — ^ 

avTodidaKTOS S^ii^iiy dths Se fioi ev <f>p€cr\v 6ifias vavrolas ivecpvffev. 

From poverty of genius they were forced to di-aw less flowing 
draughts from the Castalian spring. The bards of old Greece 
were hopelessly above them. The Alexandrines, by not over- 
powering their efi'orts, but off'ering them models which they felt 
they could not only equal but immeasurably excel, did real service 
in encouraging and stimulating the Eoman muse. Great critics 
like Niebuhr and, within certain limits, Munro, regret the mingling 
of the Alexandrine channel with the stream of Latin poetry, but 
without it we should perhaps not have had Catullus and certainly 
neither Ovid nor Virgil. 

It may easily be supposed that the national party, whether in 
politics or letters, would set themselves with all their might to 
oppose the rising current. The great majority surrendered them- 
selves to it with a good will. Among the stern reactionists in 
prose, we have mentioned Yarro ; in poetry, by far the greatest 
name is Lucretius. But little is known of Lucretius's life ; even 
the date of his birth is uncertain. St. Jerome, in the Eusebian 
chronicle, 2 gives 95 B.C. Others have with more probability 

' The reader is referred to the Introductory chapter of Sellar's Roman poets 
of the. Rc'^nihlic, where this passage is quoted. 
'■^ The reader is again referred to the preface to Munro's Lucretius 



LUCRETIUS. 221 

assigned an earlier date. It is from Jerome that we learn those 
facts wMch. have cast a strong interest round the poet, viz. that 
he was driven mad by a love potion, that he composed in the 
intervals of insanity his poem, which Cicero afterwards corrected, 
and that he perished by his own hand in the forty-fourth year of 
his age. Jerome does not quote any contemporary authority ; his 
statements, coming 500 years after the event, must go for what 
they are worth, but may perhaps meet with a qualified acceptance. 
The intense earnestness of the poem indicates a mind that we can 
well conceive giving way under the overwhelming thought which 
stirred it ; and the example of a philosopher anticipating the stroke 
of nature is too often repeated in Eoman history to make it 
incredible in this case. Tennyson with a poet's sympathy has 
surrounded this story with the deepest pathos, and it will probably 
remain the accepted, if not the established, version of his death. 

Though born in a high position, he seems to have stood aloof 
from society. From first to last his book betrays the close and 
eager student. He was an intimate friend of the worthless 
C. Memmius, whom he extols in a manner creditable to his heart 
but not to his judgment.^ But he was no flatterer, nor was 
Memmius a patron. Poet and statesman lived on terms of perfect 
equality. Of the date of his work we can so far conjecture that 
it was certainly unfinished at his death (55 B.C.), and from its scope 
and information must have extended over some years. The 
allusion — ^ 

** Nam neque nos agere hoc patriai tempore iniquo 

Possumus aequo animo, nee Memmi clara propago 

Talibus in rebus communi desse saluti," 

is considered by Prof. Sellar to point to the praetorship of Mem- 
mius (58 B.C.). The work was long thought to have been edited 
by Cicero after the poet's death ; but though he had read the 
poem,^ and admitted its talent, he would doubtless have mentioned, 
at least to Atticus, the fact of the editing, had it occurred. Some 
critics, arguing from Cicero's silence and known opposition to the 
Epicurean tenets, have thought that Jerome referred to Q. Cicero 
the orator's brother, but for this there is no authority. The poem 
is entitled De Rerum Natura^ an equivalent for the Greek Trept 
^vo-cws, the usual title of the pre-Socratic philosophers' works. 
The form, viz. a poem in heroic hexameters, containing a carefully 

^ Quern tu, dea, tempore in omni Omnibus ornatum voluisti excellere rebus. 

2 i, 41. 

3 Ep. ad Q. Fr. ii. 11. It seems best to read multis ingenii luminihis, 
non multae tamen artis than to put the non before multis. The original 
text has no non ; if we keep to that, tamen will mean and even. 



222 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

reasoned exposition, in wHcli regard was liad above all to the 
claims of the subject-matter, was borrowed from the Sicilian 
thinker Empedocles^ (460 B.C.). But while Aristotle denies 
Empedocles the title of poef^ on account of his scientific subject, 
no one could think of applying the same criticism to Lucretius 
A general view of nature, as the Power most near to man, and 
most capable of deeply moving his heart, a Power whose beauty, 
variety, and mystery, were the source of his most perplexing 
struggles as well as of his purest joys ; a desire to hold communion 
with her, and to learn from her lips, o])ened only to the ear of faith, 
those secrets which are hid from the vain world; this was the grand 
thought that stirred the depths of Lucretius's mind, and made him 
the herald of a new and end iring form of verse. It has been 
well said that didactic poetry was that in which the Eoman was 
best fitted to succeed. It was in harmony with his utilitarian 
character. 3 To give a practically useful direction to its labour was 
almost demanded from the highest poetry. To say nothing of 
Horace and Lucilius, Virgil's Aeneid, no less than his Georgics, 
has a practical aim, and to an ardent spirit like Lucretius, poetry 
would be the natural vehicle for the truths to which he longed 
to convert mankind. 

In the selection of his models, his choice fell upon the oldei 
Greek ^vriters, such as Empedocles, Aeschylus, Thucydides, mer 
reno^vned for deep thought rather than elegant expression ; and 
among the Eomans, upon Ennius and Pacuvius, the giants of a 
ruder past. Among contemporaries, Cicero alone seems to have 
awakened his admiration. Thus he stands altogether aloof from 
the fashionable standard of his day, a solitary beacon pointing to 
landmarks once well known, but now crumbling into decay.* 

Lucretius is the only Roman in whom the love of speculative 
truth^ prevails over every other feeling. In his day philosophy 
had sunk to an endless series of disputes about words. *^ Erivo- 

^ Lricr. had a great veneration for his genius, see ii. 723 : Quae (Sicilia) 
nil hoc habuisse viro praeclarius in se Nee sanctum magis et rHirwm car- 
umque videtur. Carmina quinetiam divini pectoris eius Vociferantur, et 
exponunt praeclara reperta, Ut vix huviana videatur stirpe creatus. 

^ In his treatise de Poetica he calls him (pvaioKoyov (xaWov ^ TToiT]rt)v. 

'A French writer justly sa3's — ^' Vutilite c^est le principe create ur de la 
litterature romaine'" 

^ Some one has observed that the martial imagery of Lucretius is taken 
from the old warfare of the Punic wars, not from that of his own time. He 
speaks of elephants, of Scipio and Hannibal, as if they were the heroes moet 
present to his mind. 

^ The epcos (piXoffofos, so beautifully described by Plato in the Symposium., 

® A Scotch acquaintance of the writer's when asked to define a certain 
type of theology, replied, " An interminable argument." 



LUCRETIUS. 223 

Ions quibbles and captions logical proofs, comprised tbe highest 
exercises of the speculative faculty. ^ The mind of Lucretius 
harkL back to the glorious period of creative enthusiasm, when 
Democritus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and 
Epicurus, successively believed that they had solved the great 
questions of being and knowing. Amid the zeal and confidence 
of that mighty time his soul is at home. To Epicurus as the 
inventor of the true guide of life he pays a tribute of reverential 
praise, calling him the pride of Greece, ^ and exalting him to the 
position of a god.^ It is clear to one who studies this deeply 
interesting poet that his mind was in the highest degree reveren- 
tial. No error could have been more fatal to his enjoyment of 
that equanimity, whose absence he deplores, than to select a 
creed, at once so jojdess and barren in itself, and so unsuited to 
his ardent temperament. 

When Lucretius wrote, belief in the national religion had 
among the upper classes become almost extinct. Those who 
needed conviction as a support for their life had no resource but 
Greek philosophy. The speculations of Plato, except in his more 
popular works, were not attractive to the Romans; those of 
Aristotle, brought to light in Cicero's time by the transference of 
Apellicon's library to Eome,* were a sealed book to the majority, 
though certain works, probably dialogues after the Platonic manner, 
gained the admiration of Cicero and Quintilian. The pre-Socratic 
thinkers, occupied as they were with physical questions which 
had little interest for Eomans, were still less likely to be resorted 
to. The demand for a supreme moral end made it inevitable that 
their choice should fall on one of the two schools which offered 
such an end, those of the Porch and the Garden. Which of the 
two would a man like Lucretius prefer 1 The answer is not so 
obvious as it appears. Eor Lucretius has in him nothing of the 
Epicurean in our sense. His austerity is nearer to that of the 
Stoic. It was the speculative basis underlying the ethical 
system, and not the ethical system itself, that determined his 
(hoice. Epicurus had allied his theory of pleasure^ with the 
atomic theory of Democritus. Stoicism had espoused the doc- 
trine of Heraclitus, that fire is the primordial element. Epicurus 

^ Philetas wore himself to a shadow by striving to solve the sophistic 
riddle of the "Liar." His epitaph alludes to this: EeTve, *iA^Tos ^l[i\, 
\6'',(t}v 8' 6 ^€v^6iJLiv6s fie coA.eo"e koI vvktSou (ppovTiSes ecnrcpLoi. 

2 iii. 3. "Te sequor, o Graiae gentis decus !" 

^ V. 8, where, though the words are general, the reference is to Epicurus. 

* By Sulla, 84 B.C. 

5 He defined it as a Acta Kivriffis, or smootli gentle motion of the atoms 
which compose the soul. 



224 HISTORY OF EOMAN LLTERATUEE. 

"had denied the indestructibility of tlie sonl and the divine govern^ 
ment of the world ; his gods were unconnected with mankind, 
and lived at ease in the vacant spaces between the worlds. 
Stoicism on the contrary, had incorporated the popular theology, 
bringing it into conformity with the philosophic doctrine of a 
single Deity by means of allegorical interpretation. Its views of 
Divine Providence were reconcilable with, while they elevated, 
the popular superstition. 

Lucretius had a strong hatred for the abuses into which state- 
craft and luxury had allowed the popular creed to fall ; he was 
also firmly convinced of the sufficiency of Democritus's two postu- 
lates {Atoms and the Void) to account for all the phenomena of 
the universe. Hence he gave his unreserved assent to the 
Epicurean system, which he expounds, mainly in its physical out- 
lines, in his work ; the ethical tenets being interwoven with the 
bursts of enthusiastic poetry which break, or the countless touches 
which adorn, the sustained course of his argument. 

The defects of the ancient scientific method are not wanting in 
him. Generalising from a few superficial instances, reasoning a 
jpriori, instead of winning his way by observation and comparison 
up to the Universal truth, fancying that it was possible for a 
single mind to grasp, and for a system by a few bold hypotheses 
to explain, the problem of external nature, of the soul, of tho 
existence of the gods : such are the obvious defects which 
Lucretius shares with his masters, and of which the experience of 
ages has taught us the danger as well as the charm. Eut tho 
atomic system has features which render it specially interesting 
at the present day. Its materialism, its attribution to nature of 
power sufficient to carry out all her ends, its analysis of matter 
into ultimate physical individua incognisable by sense, while yet 
it insists that the senses are the fountains of all knowledge, ^ are 
points which bring it into correspondence with hypotheses at 
present predominant. Its theory of the development of society 
from the lower to the higher without break and without 
divine intervention, and of the survival of the fittest in 
the struggle for existence, its denial of design and claim to 
explain everything by natural law, are also points of resemblance. 
Finally, the lesson he draws from this comfortless creed, not to 
sit with folded hands in silent despair, nor to " eat and drink for 
to-morrow we die," but to labour steadily for our gi^eater good and 

^ The doctrine of inlierited aptitudes is a great advance on the ancient 
statement of this theory, inasmuch as it partly gets rid of the inconsistency 
of regarding the senses as the fountains of knowledge while admitting the 
inconceivability of their cognising the ultimate constituents of matter. 



LUCEE-TIUS. 225 

to cultivate virtue in accordance witli reason, equally free from 
ambition and sloth, is strikingly like the teaching of that scientillc 
school^ which claims for its system a motive as potent to inspire 
self-denial as any that a more spiritual philosophy can give. 

Lucretius, therefore, gains moral elevation by deserting the 
conclusion of Epicurus. While he does full justice to the poetical 
side of pleasure as an end in itself, ^ he never insists on it as a 
motive to action. Thus he retains the conception as a noble orna- 
ment of his verse, but reserves to himself, as every poet must, the 
liberty to adopt another tone if he feels it higher or more appro- 
priate. Indeed, logical consistency of view would be out of place 
in a poem ; and Lucretius is nowhere a truer poet that when he 
sins against his own canons.^ His instinct told him how difficult 
it was to combine clear reasoning with a poetical garb, especially 
as the Latin language was not yet broken to the purposes of philo- 
sophy.* JSTevertheless so complete is his mastery of the subject 
that there is scarcely a difficulty arising from want of clearness of 
expression from beginning to end of the poem. There are occa- 
sional lacunae, and several passages out of place, which were either 
stop-gaps intended to be replaced by lines more appropriate, or 
additions made after the first draft of the work, which, had the 
author lived, would have been wrought into the context. The 
first three books are quite or nearly quite finished, and from them 
we can judge his power of presenting an argument. 

His chief object he states to be not the discovery, but the ex 
position of truth, for the purpose of freeing men's minds from re- 
ligious terrors. This he announces immediately after the invoca- 
tion toYenus, "Mother of the Aeneadae," with which thepoem opens. 
He then addresses himself to Memmius, whom he intreats not to 
be deterred from reading him by the rejjroach of " rationalism. "^ 
He next states his first principle, which is the denial of creation: 

"NuUam rem e nilo gigni divinitus unquam, ' 

and asks. What then is the- original substance out of which existing 
things have arisen? The answer is, "Atoms and the Void, and 
beside them nothing else :" these two principles are solid, self- 
existent, indestructible, and invisible. He next investigates and 

1 Prof. Maudesley's books are a good example. 

2 Dux vitae, dia voluntas (ii. 171). So the invocation to Venus with 
which the poem opens. 

3 As where he invokes Venus, describes the mother of the gods, or deifies 
the founder of true wisdom, 

* Nex sum animi dubius Graiorum ohscura reperta Difficile inlusirare 
Laiinis vcrsibus esse ; Multa novis verbis 2Jraesertim cum sit agendum Propter 
egestatem linguae et rerum novitatem (i. 130). s i_ 75^ 

P 



226 HISTOEY OF EOMAN LITEEATURE. 

refutes the first principles of other philosophers, notably Hera- 
clitus, Empedocles, and Anaxagoras ; and the book ends with a 
short proof that the atoms are infinite in number and space in- 
finite in extent. The Second Book opens with a digression on the 
folly of ambition ; but, returning to the aitoms, treats of the com- 
bination which enables them to form and perpetuate the present 
variety of things. All change is ultimately due to the primordial 
motion of the atoms. This motion, naturally in a straight line, 
is occasionally deflected ; and this deflection accounts for the many 
variations from exact law. Moreover, atoms diff'er in form, some 
being rough, others smooth, some round, others square, &c. They 
are combined in infinite ways, which combinations give rise to the 
so-called secondary properti(i3 of matter, colour, heat, smell, &c. 
Innumerable other worlds besides our own exist ; this one will 
probably soon pass away ; atoms and the void alone are eternal. 
In the Third Book the poet attacks what he considers the strong- 
hold of superstition. The soul, mind, or vital principle is care- 
fully discussed, and declared to be material, being composed, in- 
deed, of the finest atoms, as is shown by its rapid movement, and 
the fact that it does not add to the weight of the body, but in no 
wise sui generis, or diflering in kind from other matter. It is 
united with the body as the perfume with the incense, nor can they 
be severed without destruction to both. They are born together, 
grow together, and perish together. Death therefore is the end of 
being, and life beyond the grave is not only impossible but incon- 
ceivable. Book IV. treats of the images or idols cast off from the 
surface of bodies, borne continually through space, and sometimes 
seen by sleepers in dreams, or by sick people or others in waking 
visions. They are not illusions of the senses ; the illusion arises 
from the wrong interpretation we put upon them. To these images 
the passion of love is traced ; and with a brilliant satire on the 
effects of yielding to it the book closes. The Fifth Book examines 
the origin and formation of the solar system, which it treats not as 
eternal after the manner of the Stoics, but as having had a definite 
beginning, and as being destined to a natural and inevitable decay. 
He applies his principle of "Fortuitous ConcurrenQe" to this 
part of his subject with signal power, but the faultiness of his 
method interferes with the effect of his argument! The finest 
part of the book, and perhaps of the whole poem, is his account of 
the " origin of species," and the progress of human society. His 
views read like a hazy forecast of the evolution doctrine. He 
applies his principle with great strictness; no break occurs; 
experience alone has been the guide of life. If we ask, however, 
whether he had any idea oi;pr ogress as we Understand it, we must 



LUCRETIUS. 227 

answer no. He did not believe in tlie perfectibility of man, or in 
the ultimate prevalence of ^'irtne in the world. The last Book 
tries to show the natural origin of the rarer and more gigantic 
physical phenomena, thunderstorms, volcanoes, earthquakes, pesti- 
lence, &c. and terminates with a long description of the plague 
of Athens, in which we trace many imitations of Thucydides. 
This book is obviously unfinished ; but the aim of the work may 
be said to be so far complete that nowhere is the central object 
lost sight of, viz., to expel the belief in divine interventions, and 
to save mankind from all fear of the supernatural. 

The value of the poem to us consists not in its contributions to 
science but in its intensity of poetic feeling. ITone but a student 
will read through the disquisitions on atoms and void. All who 
love poetry will feel the charm of the digressions and introductions. 
These, which are sufficiently numerous, are either resting-places 
in the process of proof, when the writer pauses to reflect, or bursts 
of eloquent appeal which his earnestness cannot repress. Of the 
first kind are the account of spring in Book I. and the enumeration 
of female attractions in Book IV. ; of the second, are the sacrifice 
of Iphigenia,! the tribute to Empedocles and Epicurus, ^ the de- 
scription of himself as a solitary wanderer among trackless haunts 
of the Muses, ^ th-e attack on ambition and luxury,^ the pathetic 
description of the cow bereft of her calf,^ the indignant remon- 
strance with the man who fears to die.^ In these, as in innumer- 
able single touches, the poet of original genius is revealed. Virgil 
often works by allusion : Lucretius never does. All his effects 
are gained by the direct presentation of a distinct image. He has 
in a high degree the "seeing eye," which needs only a steady 
hand to body forth its visions. Take the picture of Mars in love, 
yielding to Venus's prayer for peace.'' What can be more truly 
statuesque ? 

" Belli fera moenera Mayors 
Armipotens regit, in gremiura qui saepe tuum se 
Eeiicit aeterno devictus volnere amoris : 
Atque ita suspiciens tereti cervice reposta 
Pascit amore avidos inhians in te, dea, visus, 
Eque tuo pendet resupini spiritus ore. 
Hunc tu diva tuo recubantem corpore sancto 
Circumfusa super suavis ex ore loquellas 
Funde petens pLicidam Romanis, incluta, pacem." 

Or, again, of nature's freedom : 

** Libera continuo dominis privata superbis." 



^ Lu. i. 56-95. "lb. i. 710-735; iii.1-30. 'lb. i. 912-941. Mb. ii. 1-60. 
^ lb. ii. 354-366. « lb. iii. 1036 sqq. 7 lb. j. 32-40. 



228 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

Who can fail in this to catch the tones of the Republic 1 Again, 
take his description of the transmission of existence, 

** Et quasi cursores vital ; lampada tradunt ;'* 
or of the helplessness of medicine in time of plague, 
" Mussabat tacito medicina timore," 

These are a few examples of a power present throughout, filling 
his reasonings with a vivid reality far removed from the conven- 
tional rhetoric of most philosopher poets. ^ His language is Thucy- 
didean in its chiselled outline, its quarried strength, its living 
expressiveness. 'Nov is his moral earnestness inferior. The end . 
of life is indeed nominally pleasure, ^ " dux vitae dia voluptdsf^ hut 
really it is a pure heart, ^^ At bene non poterat sine puro pedore 
vivV^ He who first showed the way to this was the true deity.* The 
contemplation of eternal law will produce, not as the strict Epicu- 
reans say, indifference,^ but resignation.^ This happiness is in our 
own power, and neither gods nor men can take it away. The ties 
of family life are depicted with enthusiasm, and though the active 
duties of a citizen are not recommended, they are certainly not 
discouraged. But the knowledge of nature alone can satisfy 
man's spirit, or enable him to lead a life worthy of the immortals, 
and see with his mind's eye their mansions of eternal rest.'' 
lls'othing can be further from the light treatment of deep problems 
current among Epicureans than the solemn earnestness of Lucre- 
tius. He cannot leave the world to its vanity and enjoy himself. 
He seeks to bring men to his views, but at the same time he sees 
how hopeless is the task. He becomes a pessimist: in Eoman 
language, Jie despairs of the Republic. He is a lonely spirit, 
religious even in his anti-religionism, full of reverence, but ignorant 
what to worship ; a splendid poet, feeding his spirit on the husks 
of mechanical causation. 

With regard to his language, there can be but one opinion. Ifc 
is at times harsh, at times redundant, at times prosaic ; but at a 
time when " Greek, and often debased Greek, had made fatal in- 
roads into the national idiom," his Latin has the purity of that of 
Cicero or Terence. Like Lucilius, he introduces single Greek 
words,^ a practice which Horace wisely rejects,^ but which is 

' Contrast him with Maiiilius, or with Ovid in the last hook of the 
MetamoriJJioses, or with the author of Etna. The difference is immense. 

2 Lu. ii. 371. ^ Ih. V. 18. * jb. Jb. v. 3. 

« lb. ^Trdeeia ^ lb. v. 1201, sqq. 

^ The passage in which they are described is perhaps the most beautiful 
in Latin poetry, iii. 18, sqq. Cf. ii. 644. 

s E.g. 6uoiofxip6iay and various terms of endearment, iv. 1154-63. 

» S. i. io. 



LUCRETIUS. 229 

revived in the poetry of the Empire.^ His poetical ornaments 
are those of the older writers. Archaism, ^ alliteration,^ and as- 
sonance abound in his pages. These would not have been regarded 
as defects by critics like Cicero or Yarro ; they are instances of his 
determination to give way in nothing to the fashion of the day. 

His style* is fresh, strong, and impetuous, but frequently and 
intentionally rugged. Eepetitions occasionally wearisome, and 
prosaic constructions, occur. Poetry is sacrificed to logic in the 
innumerable particles of transition,^ and in the painfid precision 
which at times leaves nothing to the imagination of the reader. 
But his vocabulary is not prosaic ; it is poetical to a degree ex- 
ceeding that of all other Latin writers. It is to be regretted that 
he did not of tener allow himself to be carried away by the stroke of 
the thyrsus, which impelled him to strive for the meed of praise.^ 

He is not often mentioned in later literature. Quintilian charac- 
terises him as elegant but difficult;^ Ovid and Statins warmly praise 
him;^ Horace alludes to him as his own teacher in philosophy;^ 
Yirgil, though he never mentions his name, refers to him in a 
celebrated passage, and shows in all his works traces of a profound 
study of, and admiration for, his poetry. ^^ Ovid draws largely from 
him in the Metamorplioses, and Manilius had evidently adopted 
him as a model. The writer of Etna echoes his language and 
sentiments, and Tacitus, in a later generation, speaks of critics 
who even preferred him to Yirgil. The irreligious tendency of 
his work seems to have brought his name under a cloud; and 
those who copied him may have thought it wiser not to acknow- 
ledge their debt. The later Empire and the Middle Ages remained 
indifferent to a poem which sought to disturb belief; it was when 
the scepticism of the eighteenth century broke forth that Lucretius's 
power was first fully felt. Since the time of Boyle he has com- 
manded from some minds an almost enthusiastic admiration. His 
spirit lives in Shelley, though he has not yet found a poet of 

^ E.g. frequently in Juvenal. 

2 E. g. terrai frugiferai : lumina sis oculis : indugredi, volta, vacefit, facit 
are on the analocry of Ennius's cere, comminidt brum, salsae lacrimae, &c. 

^ See Appendix. 

^ Besides the passages quoted or referred to, the following throw light 
upon his opinions or genius. The introduction (i. 1-55), the attack on 
mythology (li, 161-181, 591-650) ; that on the fear of death (iii. 943-983), 
the account of the progress of the arts (v. 1358-1408), and the recommen- 
dation of a calm mind (v. 56-77). 

^ E.g. quocirca. qiiandoqiddcvi, id ita esse, quod sicperest, Hue acccdit ut, &c. 

« Lu. i. 914. 7 Qu^ X. 1, 87. »0v. Am. i. 15, 23; Stat. Silv. ii. 7, 76. 

* Hor. Dcos didici sccurtcm agere aevom, S. i. v. 101. 

" Georg. ii, 490. Connington in his edition of Virgil, points out hundreds 
of imitations of his diction. 



230 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

kindred genius to translate him. But his great name and the 
force with which he strikes chords to which every soul at times 
vibrates must, now that he is once known, secure for him a high 
place among the masters of thoughtful song. 

Transpadane Gaul was at this time fertile in poets. Besides 
two of the first order it produced several of the second rank. 
Among these M. Furius Bibaculus (103-29? b.c.) must be noticed. 
His exact date is uncertain, but he is known to have lampooned 
both Julius and Augustus Cuesar,^ and perhaps lived to find himself 
the sole representative of the earlier race of poets. ^ He is one of 
the few men of the period who attained to old age. Some have 
supposed that the line of Horace — ^ 

'* Turgidus Alpinus jngulat dum Memnona," 
refers to him, the nickname of Alpinus having been given him on 
account of his ludicrous description of Jove " spitting snow upon 
the Alps." Others have assigned the eight spurious lines on 
Lucilius in the tenth satire of Horace to him. Macrobius pre- 
serves several verses from his Bellum GalUcunii which Virgil has 
not disdained to imitate, e.g. 

"Interea Oceani linquens Aurora cuLile." 
** Rumoresque serunt varios et multa requirunt." 
**Confimat dictis simul atque exsuscitat acres 
Ad bellandum animos reficitque ad praelia mentes.*** 

Many of the critics of this period also wrote poems. Among 
these was Valerius Cato, sometimes called Cato Grammaticus, 
whose love elegies were known to Ovid. He also amused himself 
with short mythological pieces, none of which have come down to 
us. Two short poems called Dirae and Lydia, which used to be 
printed among Virgil's Cataleda, bear his name, but are now 
generally regarded as spurious. They contain the bitter complaints 
of one Avho was turned out of his estate by an intruding soldier, 
and his resolution to find solace for all ills in the love of his 
faithful mistress. 

The absorbing interest of the war between Caesar and Pompey 
compelled all classes to share its troubles; even the poets did not 
escape. They were now very numerous. Already the vain desire 
to write had become universal among the jeunesse of the capital. 
The seductive methods by which Alexandrinism had made it 
equally easy to enslirine in verse his morning reading or his eve- 

^ Tac. Ann. Iv. 34. 

2 AVe cannot certainly gather that Furius was alive when Horace wrote 
Sat. ii. 5, 40, 

*' Furius hibemas cana nive conspuit Alpes.' 

8 S. i. X. 36. * See Virg. Aen. iv. 585; xii. 228; xi. 731. 



VARRO OF ATAX. 231 

ning's amour, proved too great an attraction for tlie young Roman 
votary of the muses. Eome already teemed with, the class so 
pitilessly satirized by Horace and Juvenal, the 

"Saecli incommoda, pessimi poetae." 

The first name of any celebrity is that of Varro Atacinus, a 
native of Gallia Narbonensis. He was a varied and prolilic 
TVTiter, who cultivated with some success at least three domains of 
poetry.- In his younger days he wrote satires, but without any 
aptitude for the work.i These he deserted for the epos, in which 
he gained some credit by his poem on the Sequanian "War. This 
was a national epic after the manner of Ennius, but from the 
silence of later poets we may conjecture that it did not retain its 
popularity. At the age of thirty-five he began to study with 
diligence the Alexandrine models, and gained much credit by his 
translation of the ArgonauUca of Apollonius. Ovid often men- 
tions this poem with admiration ; he calls Varro the poet of the 
sail-tossing sea, says no age will be ignorant of his fame, and even 
thinks the ocean gods may have helped him to compose his song.^ 
Quintilian with better judgment^ notes his deficiency both in 
originality and copiousness, but allows him the merit of a careful 
translator. We gather from a passage of Ovid * that he wrote 
love jjoems, and from other soui'ces that he translated Greek works 
on topography and meteorology, both strictly copied from the 
Alexandrines. 

Besides Varro, we hear of Ticidas, of Memmius the friend of 
Lucretius, of C. Helvius Cinna, and C. Licinius Calvus, as 
writers of erotic poetry. The last two were also eminent in other 
branches. Cinna (50 B.C.), who is mentioned by Virgil as a poet 
superior to himself,^ gained renqwn by his Smyrna, an epic 
based on the unnatural love of Myrrha for her father Cinyras,^ 
on which revolting subject he bestowed nine years''' of elabora- 
tion, tricking it out with every arid device that pedantry's long 
list could supply. Its learning, however, prevented it from being 
neglected. Until the Aeneid appeared, it was considered the 
fullest repository of choice mythological lore. It was perhaps 
the nearest approach ever made in Rome to an original Alex- 
andrine poem. Calvus (82-47 b.c.), who is genei.Jly coupled 
with Catullus, was a distinguished orator as well as poeib. Cicero 
pays him the compliment ctf honourable mention in the Brutus,^ 

^ Hor. S. i. X, 46, expe,rto frustra Varrone Atacino. 
» Ov. Am. i. XV. 21; Ep. ex. Pont. iv. xvi. 21. ^ Qu. x. 1, 87. 

* Trist. ii. 439. For some specimens of his manner see App.to chap. i. note 3. 
6 Eel. ix. 35. « Told by Ovid {Mctam. bk. x.). 

'' Cat. xcv. 1. » Cic. (^Brut.) Ixxxii. 283. 



282 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

praising his parts and lamenting Ms early death. He thinks his 
success would have been greater had he forgotten liimself more. 
This egotism was probably not wanting to his poetry, but much 
may be excused him on account of his youth. It is difficult to 
form an opinion of his style ; the epithets, gravis, vehemens, exilis 
(which apply rather to his oratory than to his poetry), seem con- 
tradictory ; the last strikes us as the most discriminating. Besides 
short elegies like those of Catullus, he ^vrote an epic called /o, 
as well as lampoons against Pompey and other leading men. "We 
possess none of his fragments. 

From Calvus we pass to Catullus. This great poet was born at 
Verona (87 B.C.), and died, according to Jerome, in his thirty-first 
year ; but this is generally held to be an error,.and Prof. Ellis 
fixes his death in 54 b.c. In either case he was a young man 
when he died, and this is an important consideration in criticising 
his poems. He came as a youth to Eome, where he mixed freely 
in the best society, and where he continued to reside, except when 
his health or fortunes made a change desirable. ^ At such times 
he resorted either to Sirmio, a picturesque spot on the Lago di 
Garda,2 where he had a villa, or else to his Tiburtine estate, which, 
he tells us, he mortgaged to meet certain pecuniary embarrass- 
ments.^ Among his friends were ]N"epos, who first acknowledged 
his genius,* to whom the grateful poet dedicated his book; 
Cicero, whose eloquence he warmly admired;^ Pollio, Cornificius, 
Cinna, and Calvus, besides many others less known to fame. 
Like all warm natures, he was a good hater. Caesar and his 
friend Mamurra felt his satire ; ^ and though he was afterwards 
reconciled to Caesar, the reconciliation did not go beyond a cold 
indifference.'^ To Mamurra he was implacably hostile, but satir- 
ised him under the fictitious name of Mentula to avoid offending 
Caesar. His life was that of a thorough man of pleasure, who 
was also a man of letters. Indifferent to politics, he formed 
friendships and enmities for personal reasons alone. Two events 
in his life are important for us, since they affected his genius — 
his love for Lesbia, and his brother's death. The former was the 
master-passion of his life. It began in the fresh devotion of a 
first love ; it survived the cruel shocks of infidelity and indiffer- 
ence; and, though no longer as before united with respect, it 

^ Romae vivimiis : ilia domus, Ixviii. 34. ^ See. C. xxxi. ^ C. xxv. 

^ C. i. 5 C. xlix. ^ C. xciii. Ivii. xxix. 

^ What a different character does this reveal from that of the Augustan 
poets ! Comparp the sentiment in C. xcii. : 

" Fil nimium studeo Caesar tibi telle placere 
Nee scire utrum sis albus an ater homo.^ 



CATULLUS. 233 

endured unextinguislied to the end, burning with the passion of 
despair. 

^\Tio Lesbia was, has been the subject of much discussion. 
There can be little doubt that Apuleius's information is correct, 
and that her real name was Clodia. If so, it is most natural to 
suppose her the same with that abandoned woman, the sister 5f 
P. Clodius Pulcher, whom Cicero brands with infamy in his 
speech for Caelius. Unwillingness to associate the graceful verse 
of Catullus with a theme so imworthy has perhaps led the critics 
to question without reason the identity. But the portrait 
drawn by the poet when at length his eyes were opened, 
answers but too truly to that of the orator. Few things in all 
literature are sadder than the spectacle of this trusting and gene- 
rous spirit withered by the unkindness, as it had been soiled by 
the favours, of this evil beauty.^ The life which began in raptu- 
rous devotion ends in hopeless gloom. The poet whose every 
nerve was strung to the delights of an unselfish though guilty 
passion, now that the spell is broken, finds life a burden, and 
confronts with relief the thought of death which, as he antici- 
pated, soon came to end his sorrows. 

The affection of Catullus for his only brother, lost to him by 
an early death, forms the counterpoise to his love for Lesbia. 
Wliere this brings remorse, the other brings a soothing melan- 
choly; the memory of this sacred sorrow struggles to cast out the 
harassing regrets that torment his soul.^ ISTothing can surpass the 
simple pathos with which he alludes to this event. It is the subject 
of one short elegy, ^ and enters largely into another. When 
travelling with the pro-praetor Memmius into Bithynia, he visited 
his brother's tomb at Ehoeteum in the Troad. It was on his 
return from this journey, undertaken, but without success, in the 
hope of bettering his fortune, that he wrote the little poem to 
Sirmio,* which dwells on the associations of home with a sweet- 
ness perhaps unequalled in ancient poetry.^ 

In this, and indeed in all his shorter pieces, his character is 
unmistakably revealed. No writer, ancient or modem, is more 
frank than he. He neither hides his own faults, nor desires his 
friends to hide theirs from him;® his verses are the honest spon- 

* For tlie character of Clodia, see Cic. pro Gael, passim ; and for her 
criminal passion for her brother, compare Cat. Ixxix., which is only intelli- 
gible if so understood. Cf. also Iviii. xci. Ixxvi. 

2 The beautiful and pathetic poem (C. Ixxvi.) in which he expresses his 
longing for peace of mind suggests this remark. 

'^ C. Ixv. and Ixviii. ■* C. xxxi. 

^ Compare, however, Lucr. iii, 606-8. 

* C. vi. 15, quicquid habes honi malique Die nobis. 



234 HISTOEY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

taneous expression of his every-day life. In tliem we see a youth, 
ardent, iinafFected, impulsive, generous, courteous, and outspoken, 
but indifferent to the serious interests of life; recklessly self-indulg- 
ent, plunging into the grossest sensuality, and that with so little 
sense of guilt as to appeal to Heaven as witness of the purity of 
his life :i we see a poet, full of delicate feeling and of love for 
the beautiful, with a strong lyrical impulse fresh as that of 
Greece, and an appreciation of Greek feeling that makes him 
revive the very inspiration of Greek genius ;2 with a chaste simpli- 
city of style that faithfully reflects every mood, and with an 
amount of learning which, if inconsiderable as compared with 
that of the Augustan poets, much exceeded that of his chief prede- 
cessors, and secured for him the honourable epithet of the learned 
{dodus).^ 

The poems of Catullus fall naturally into three divisions, 
doubtless made by the poet himself. These are the short lyrical 
pieces in various metres, containing the best known of those to 
Lesbia, besides others to his most intimate friends; then come 
the longer poems, mostly in heroic or elegiac metre, representing 
the higher flights of his genius; and lastly, the epigrams on 
divers subjects, all in the elegiac metre, of which both the list 
and the text are imperfect. In all we meet with the same care- 
less grace and simplicity both of thought and diction, but all do not 
show the same artistic skill. The judgment that led Catullus to 
place his lyric poems in the foreground was right. They are the 
best known, the best finished, and the most popular of all his 
compositions ; the four to Lesbia, the one to Sirmio, and that on 
Acme and Septimus, are perhaps the most perfect lyrics in the 
Latin language ; and others are scarcely inferior to them in 
elegance. The hendecasyllabic rhythm, in which the greater 
part are written, is the one best suited to display the poet's special 
gifts. Of this metre he is the first and only master. Horace 
does not employ it ; and neither Martial nor Statins avoids mono- 
tony in the use of it. The freedom of cadence, the varied caesura, 
and the licences in the first foot,"^ give the charm of irregular 
beauty, so sweet in itself and so rare in Latin poetry ; and the 
rhythm lends itseK with equal ease to playful humour, fierce 

^ See xix. 5-9, and Ixxvi. 2 Especially in the Attis. 

^ Ov. Amor. iii. 9, 62, clode Catulle. So Mart. viii. 73, 8. Perhaps sati- 
rically alluded to by Horace, simiics iste Nil praeter Calvum et doctus 
cantare Catullum. S, I. x. 

^ The first foot may be a spondee, a tro hee, or an iambus. The licence is 
regarded as duriusculum by Pliny the Elder. But in this case freedom 
suited the Roman treatment of the metre better than strictness. 



CATULLUS. 235 

satire, and tender affection. Other measures, used witli more or 
less success, are the iambic scazon,i the choriambic, the glyconic, 
and the sapphic, all probably introduced from the Greek by 
Catullus. Of these the sapphic is the least perfected. If the 
eleventh and fifty-first odes be compared with the sapphic odes of 
Horace, the great metrical superiority of the latter will at once 
appear. Catullus copies the Greek rhythm in its details without 
asking whether these are in accordance with the genius of the 
Latin language. Horace, by adopting stricter rules, produces a 
much more harmonious effect. The same is true of Catullus's 
treatment of the elegiac, as compared with that of Propertius or 
Ovid. The Greek elegiac does not require any stop at the end of 
the couplet, nor does it affect any special ending ; words of seven 
syllables or less are used by it indilferently. The trisyllabic 
ending, which i. ill but unknown to Ovid, occurs continually in 
Catullus ; even the monosyllabic, which is altogether avoided by 
succeeding poets-, occurs once.^ Another licence, still more alien 
from Eoman usage, is the retention of a short or unelided 
syllable at the end of the first penthemimer.^ Catullus's elegiac 
belongs to the class of haK-adapted importations, beautiful in 
its way, but rather because it recalls the exquisite cadences of the 
Greek than as being in itself a finished artistic product. 

The six long poems are of unequal merit. The modern reader 
will not find much to interest him in the Coma Berenices^ 
abounding as it does in mythological aUusions.* The poem to 
Mallius or Allius,^ written at Yerona, is partly mythological, 
partly personal, and though someAvhat desultory, contains many 
fine passages. Catullus pleads his want of books as an excuse for 
a poor poem, implying that a full library was his usual resort for 
composition. This poem was written shortly after his brother's 

^ A trimeter iambic line with a spondee in the last place, which must 
always be preceded by an iambus, e.g. Miser Catulle desinas Inejjtlre. 

^ E.g. in C. Ixxxiv. (12 lines) there is not a single dissyllabic ending. 
In one place we have dictaque factaque sunt. I think Martial also has 
hoc scio, non amo te. The best instance of continuous narration in this 
metre is Ixvi. 105-30, Quo tihi turn — co'aciliata viro, a veiy sonorous passage. 

^ E.g. Pcrfeda exigitur \ una dmicitia, (see Ellis. Catull. Proleg.), and 
Itqntcr ut Chalyhum \ omne genus pereat., which is in accord with old 
Roman usage, and is modelled on Callimachus's ZeG irdrep, us xoA.u)8a>j/ ttuv 
a'ir6\oi.TO yeuos. 

■* This has been alluded to under Aratus. As a specimen of Catullus's style 
of translation, we append two lines, "^H /xc Koi/uv e^Xe^pev eV r}€pi rhv 
BepevUrjs ^oaTpvxov hv K^'ivr] iraaiv idrjKe deoTs, which are thus rendered, 
Idem me ille Conon caelesti munere vidit E Bereniceo vertice caesariem Ful- 
gentem clare, quam multis ilia deorum Levia protendens brachia polUcita 
est. The additions are characteristic. ^ clxviii. 



V 



236 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

deatli, wliicli throws a vein of melancholy into the thought. In 
it, and still more happily in his two Epithalamia,'^ he paints with 
deep feeling the joys of wedded love. The former of these, which 
celebrates the marriage of Manlius Torquatus, is the loveliest 
product of his genius. It is marred by a few gross allusions, but 
they are not enough to interfere with its general effect. It rings 
throughout with joyous exultation, and on the whole is innocent 
as well as full of warm feeling. It is all movement ; the scene 
opens before us; the marriage god wreathed with flowers and 
holding the flammeum, or niifptial^ veil, leads the dance ; then the 
doors open, and amid waving torches the bride, blushing like the 
purple hyacinth, enters with downcast mien, her friends comfort- 
ing her; the bridegroom stands by and throws nuts to the 
assembled guests : light railleries are banded to and fro ; meanwhile 
the bride is lifted over the threshold, and sinks on the nuptial 
couch, alha parthenice velut, luteumve papaver. The different 
sketches of Aurunculeia as the loving bride, the chaste matron, 
and the aged grandame nodding kindly to everybody, please from 
their unadorned simplicity as well as from their innate beauty. 

The second of these Epithalamia is, if not translated, certainly 
modelled from the Greek, and in its imagery reminds us of Sappho. 
It is less ardent and more studied than the first, and though its 
tone is far less elevated, it gains a special charm from its calm, 
almost statuesque language. ^ The Nuptials of Peleus and Thetis 
is a miniature epic,^ such as were often written by the Alexan- 
drian poets. Short as it is, it contains two plots, one within the 
other. The story of Peleus's marriage is made the occasion for 
describing the scene embroidered on the coverlet or cushion of the 
marriage bed. This contains the loves of Theseus and Ariadne, 
the Minotaur, the Labyrinth, the return of Theseus, his desertion 
of Ariadne, and her reception into the stars by lacchus. The 
poem is unequal in execution ; the finest passages are the lament 
of Ariadne, which Yirgil has imitated in that of Dido, and the 
song of the Fates, which gives the first instances of those^refrains 
taken from the Greek pastoral, which please so much in the 
Eclogues, and in Tennyson's May Queen. The Atys or Attis 
stands alone among the poet's works. Its subject is the self- 
mutilation of a noble youth out of zeal for Cybele's worship, and 
is probably a study from the Greek, though of what period it 
would be hard to say. A theme so unnatural would have found 
little favour with the Attic poets ; the subject is more likely to 
have been approached by the Alexandrian writers, whom Catullus 

^ Ca. cixi: Ixii. 

* The conceit in v, 63, 64, must surely Le Greek. ^ 'lL^{vkXlo^. 



CATULLUS. 237 

often copies. But these tame and pedantic versifiers could have 
given no precedent for the wild inspiration of this strange poem, 
which clothes in the music of finished art bursts of savage emotion. 
The metre is galliamhic, a rhythm proper to the hymns of Cybele, 
but of which no primitive Greek example remains. The poem 
cannot be perused with pleasure, but must excite astonishment at 
the power it displays. The language is tinged with archaisms, 
especially compounds like hederigera, silvicultrix. In general 
Catullus writes in the plain unaffected language of daily life. His 
effects are produced by the freshness rather than the choiceness of 
his terms, and by his truth to nature and good taste. His con- 
struction of sentences, like that of Lucretius, becomes at times 
prosaic, from the effort to avoid all ambiguity. If the first forty 
lines of his Epistle to MaUius^ be studied and compared with any 
of Ovid's Epistles from Pontus, the great difference in this respect 
will at once be seen. Later writers leave most of the particles of 
transition to be supplied by the reader's intelligence : Catullus, like 
Sophocles, indicates the sequence of thought. Nevertheless poetry 
lost more than it gained by the want of grammatical connection 
between successive passages, which, while it adds point, detracts 
from clearness, and makes the interpretation, for example, of 
Persius and Juvenal very much less satisfactory than that of 
Lucretius or Horace. 

The genius of Catullus met with early recog-nition. Cornelius 
Nepos, in his life of Atticus (ch. xii.), couples him with Lucretius 
as the first poet of the age (nostra aetas), and his popularity, 
though obscured during the Augustan period, soon revived, and 
remained undiminished until the close of Latin literature. During 
the Middle Ages CatuUus was nearly being lost to us ; he is 
preserved in but one manuscript discovered in the fourteenth 
century. 2 

Catullus is the last of the Eepublican poets. Separated by but 
a few years from the Eclogues of Virgil, a totally different spirit 
pervades the works of the two writers ; while Catullus is free, 
unblushing, and fearless, owing allegiance to no man, Yirgil is 
already guarded, restrained, and diffident of himself, trusting to 
Pollio or Augustus to perfect his muse, and guide it to its proper 
sphere. In point of language the two periods show no break ; in 
point of feeling they are altogether different. A few survived 
from the one into the other, but as a rule they relapsed into 
silence, or indulged merely in declamation. We feel that Catullus 
was fortunate in dying before the battle of Actium ; had he lived 

* C 68. 2 See Ellis, Cat. Frolegoviena. 



238 



HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 



into tlie Augustan age, it is difficult to see how he could have 
found a place there He is a fitting close to this passionate and 
stormy period, a youth in whom all its qualities for good and evil 
have their fullest embodiment. 



APPENDIX. 



Note I. — On the Use of Alliteration in Latin Poetry* 



It is impossible to read the earlier 
Latin poets, or even Virgil, without 
seeing that they abound in repetitions 
of the same letter or sound, either in- 
tentionally introduced or unconsci- 
ously presenting themselves owing to 
constant habit. Alliteration and as- 
sonance are the natural ornaments of 
poetry in a rude age. In Anglo-Saxon 
literature alliteration is one of the 
chief ways of distinguishing poetry 
from prose. But when a strict pro- 
sody is formed, it is no longer needed. 
Thus in almost all civilised poetry it 
has been discarded, except as an oc- 
casional and appropriate ornament for 
a special purpose. Greek poetry gives 
few instances. The art of Homer has 
long passed the stage at which such 
an aid to effect is sought for. The 
cadence of the Greek hexameter would 
be marred by so inartistic a device. 
The dramatists resort to it now and 
then, e.g. Oedipus, in his blind rage, 
thus taunts Tiresias : 

Tv<p\hs r& r' Sira top re vovv rd t' 
op-ixar' el. 

But here the alliteration is as true to 
nature as it is artistically effective. 
For it is known that violent emotion 
irresistibly compels us to heap to- 
gether similar sounds. Several subtle 
and probably unconscious instances of 
it are given by Peile from the Idyllic 
poets ; but as a rule it is true of Greek 
as it is of English, French, and Italian 
poetry, that when: metre, caesura, or 
rhyme, hold sway, alliteration plays 



an altogether subordinate part. It is 
otherwise in Latin poetry. Here, 
owing to the fondness for all that is 
old, alliteration is retained in what is 
correspondingly a much later period 
of growth. After Virgil, indeed, it 
almost disappears, but as used by him 
it is such an instrument for effect, 
that perhaps the discontinuance of it 
was a loss rather than a gain. It is 
employed in Latin poetry for various 
purposes. Plautus makes it subser- 
vient to comic effect (Capt. 903, 
quoted by Munro. ). 

" Quanta pernis p4stis veniet, quanta Idbes 

Idrido, 
Quanta sumini dbsumedo, quanta cdllo cdlor 

mitas 
Quanta Idniis Idssitiido" 

Compare our verse : 

" Eight round the nigged rock the ragged 
rascal ran." 

Ennius and the tragedians make it 
express the stronger emotions, as 
violence : 

" Priamo vi vitam evitari." 

So Virgil, imitating him : ft via m; 
Lucr. vivida vis animi pervicit; or 
again pity, which is ex})ressed by the 
same letter (pronounced as w), e.g. 
neu patriae validas in viscera vertite 
vires; viva videns vivo sepeliri viscera, 
busto, from Virgil and Lucr. resppc- 
tively. A hard letter ex]iresses diffi- 
culty or effort, e.g. manibus magnos 
divellere mantis. So Pope : Up the 
high hill he heaves a hvge round stone. 
Or emphasis, parare non potuit pedi- 



APPENDIX. 



239 



bus qui pontum per vada possent, from 
Lucretius; rauUaqiie 'pvneterea vahim- 
■prsiedicta prior^m, from Virgil, Rarely 
it has no special appropiiateness, or 
is a mere display of ingenuity, as : 
Tite tute Tati tibi tanta tyranne 
tulisti (Ennius). Assonance is al- 
most equally common, and is even 
more strange to our taste. In 
Greek, Hebrew, and many languages, 
it occurs in the form of Paronoma- 
sia, or play on words ; but this pre- 
supposes a rapport between the 
name and what is implied by it. 
Assonance in Latin poetry has no such 
relevance. It simply emphasizes or 
adorns, e.g. Angasto angnvio j^ostquam 
incluta condita Roma est .(Enn. ); 
pulcram pulcritudinevi (Plant.), It 
takes divers forms, e.g. the ofioiore- 
\evTov, akin to our rliyme, Vincla 
recusantumetsera sub node rt^entum ; 
cornua velataxTxm. obvertimus antenn- 
arum. The beginnings of rhyme are 
here seen, and perhaps still more in 
the elegiac, debuerant fusos evoluisse I 



meos ; or Sapphic, Pone me pigris ubi 
nulla cavipis Arbor apstivz. recrcatur 
aura.. Other varieties of assonance 
are the frequent employment of the 
same preposition in the same part of the 
foot, e.g. insontem, infando indicio— 
disjectis disque swpatis; the mere repe- 
tition of the same word, lacerum cru- 
deliter era, oi'a manusque; or of a 
different inflexion of it, omnis feret 
omnia tellus, rwn ovinia 2^ossumus 
mnnes ; most often of all, by employing 
several words of a somewhat similar 
sound, what is in fact a jingle, e.g. 
the well-known line, Cedaut a7-ma 
togae cowcedat laurea \a,xidi; or again, 
mente cZemente edita (Laberius). 
Instances of this are endless ; and in 
estimating the mechanical structure of 
Latin poetry, which is the chief siile 
of it, we observe tlie care with which 
thp greatest artists retain every method 
of producing effect, even if somewhat 
old fashioned. (See on this subject 
Munro's Lucr. preface to Notes II. 
which has often been referred to.) 



Note II.- 



-Some additional details on the History of the Mimus (from 
Woelfflin. Publ. Syri Sententiae, Lips. 1869). 



The mime at first differed from 
other kinds of comedy — (1) in having 
no proper plot ; (2) in not being re- 
presented primarily on the stage ; (3) 
in having but one actor. Eudicos imi- 
tated the gestures of boxing ; Theo- 
dorus the creaking of a windlass; Par- 
meno did the grunting of a pig to per- 
fection. Any one who raised a laugh 
by such kinds of imitation was pro- 
perly said mimum, agtre. Mimes are 
thus defined by Diomedes (p. 491, 13 
k), sermon.'ts cuiv^libet et moiijis s'ine 
reverentia vel factorum et dictorum 
turpium cum lascivia imitatio. Such 
mimes as these were often held at 
banquets for the amusement of great 
men. Sulla was passionately fond of 
them. Admitted to the stage, they 
naturally took the place of interludes 
or afterpieces. When a man imitated 
e.g. a muleteer (Petr. Sat, 68), he had 
his mule with him ; or if he imitated 
a causidicus, or a drunken ruffian 



(Ath. 14, 621, c), some other person 
was by to play the toil to his violence. 
Tlius arose the distinction of parts and 
dialogue ; the chief actor was called 
Archimimus, and the mime was then 
developed after the example of the 
Atellanae, When several actors 
took part in a piece, each was said 
mimum agere, though this phrase 
originally applied onlylo the single 
actor. 

When the mime first came on the 
stage, it was acted in front of the 
curtain (Fest. p, 326, ed Miill), after- 
wards, as its proportions increased, a 
new kind of curtain called siparium 
was introduced, so that while the 
mime was being performed on this 
new and enlarged proscaenium the 
preparations for the next act of the 
regular drama were going on behind 
the siparium, Pliny (xxxv, ]99) 
calls Syrus mimicae scaenae condi. 
torem; and as he certainly did not. 



k 



240 



HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 



build a theatre, it is most probable 
that Pliny refers to his invention of 
the siparium. He evidently had a 
natural genius for this kind of repre- 
sentation, in which Macrobius (ii, 
7. 6) and Quintilian allow him the 
highest place. Laberins appears to 
have been a more careful writer. 
Syrus was not a literary man, but an 
improvisator and moralist. His sen- 
tentiae were held in great honour in 
the rhetorical schools in the time of 
Augustus, and are quoted by the elder 
Seneca (Contr. 206, 4). The younger 
Seneca also frequently quotes them in 
his letters (Ep. 108, 8, &c. ), and often 
imitates their style. There are some 
interesting lines in Petronius (Satir. 
55), which are almost certainly from 
Syrus. Being little known, they are 



worth quoting as a popular denun- 
ciation of luxury — 
" Luxuriae rictu Martis marcent moenia, 
Tuo palato clausus pavo pascitur 
Plumato amictus aureo Babylonico; 
Gallhia tibi Numidica, tibi gallus spado: 
Ciconia etiam grara peregi ina hospita 
Pietaticultrix gracilipcs crotalistiia 
Avis, exiil hiemis, titulus tepidi temporis 
Nequitiae nidum in cacabo fecit modo. 
Quo margaiita cara tribaca Indica? 
An ut matrona ornata plialevis pelagiis 
Tdllat pedes indomita in strato extraneo? 
Zmaragdum ad qiiam rem viridem, pre- 

tiosum vitium. 
Quo Cavchedonios optas ignes Lipideos 
"^isiVLtsciutiHes? pfobitas est carbunculus.*^ 

There is a rude but unmistakable 
vigour in these lines which, when 
compared with the quotation from 
Laberius given in the text of the work, 
cause us to think very highly of the 
mime as patronized by Caesar. 



Note III, — Fragments of Valerius Soranus. 



This writer, who was somewhat 
earlier than the present epoch, having 
been a contemporary of Sulla but 
having outlived him, was noted for 
his great learning. He is mentioned 
by Pliny as the first to prefix a table of 
contents to his book. His native town, 
Sora, was well known for its activity 
in liberal studies. He is said by Plu- 
tarch to have announced publicly the 
secret name of Rome or of her tutelary 
deity, for which the gods punished 
him by death. St. Augustine (C. D. 
vii. 9) quotes two interesting hexa- 
meters as from him : 



" lupiter omniporens, rerum rex Ipse deusqne 
Progenitor genetrixque, deum deus, unus et 
omnes." 

Servius (Aen. iv. 638) cites two 
verses of a similar character, which 
are most probably from Soranus. 
lupiter, addressing the gods, says, 

" Caelicolae, mea membra, dei, quos nostra 
potestas 
Officiis, diversa facit." 

These fragments show an extra- 
ordinary power of condensed expres- 
sion, as well as a clear grasp on the 
unity of the Supreme Being, for which 
reason they are quoted. 



PART 11. 

THE AUGUSTAN EPOCH (42 B.0.-14 a.d,>. 



CHAPTEE L 

General Chaeacteristics. 

The Augustan Age in its strictest sense does not begin until 
after the battle of Actium, when Augustus, having overthrown 
his competitor, found himseK in undisputed possession of the 
Roman world (31 B.C.). But as the Eclogues, and many of Horace's 
poems, were written at an earlier date, and none of these can be 
ranked with the Republican literature, it is best to assign the 
commencement of the Augustan period to the year of the battle of 
Philippi, when the defeat of Brutus and Cassius left the old 
constitution without a champion and made monarchy in the per- 
son either of Antonius or Octavius inevitable. This period of 
fifty-seven years, extending to the death of Augustus, comprises 
a long list of splendid writers, inferior to those of the Ciceronian 
age in vigour and boldness, but superior to all but Cicero himself 
in finish and artistic skill as well as in breadth of human sym- 
pathy and suggestive beauty of expression. It marks the culmi- 
nation of Latin poetry, as the last epoch marks the perfection of 
Latin prose. But the bloom which had been so long expanding 
■was short-lived in proportion to its sweetness ; and perfect as 
is the art of Virgil, Horace, and Tibullus, within a few years of 
Horace's death both style and thought had entered on the path of 
irretrievable decline. The muse of Ovid, captivating and brilliant, 
has already lost the severe grace that stamps the highest classic 
verse ; and the false tendencies forgiven ui him from admiration for 
his talent, become painfully conspicuous in his younger contem- 
poraries. Livy, too, in the domain of history, shows traces of that 
poetical colouriD.g which began more and more to encroach on the 
style of prose ; while in the work of Vitruvius, on the one hand 



242 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

and in that of tlie elder Seneca on tlie other, we ohserve two ten- 
dencies which helped to accelerate decay ; the one towards an 
entire absence of literary finish, the other towards the substitution 
of rich decoration for chaste ornament. 

There are certain common features shared by the chief Augustan 
authors which distinguish them from those of the closing Kepub- 
lic. While the latter were men of birth and eminence in the 
state, the former were mostly Italians or provincials,^ often of 
humble origin, neither warriors nor statesmen, but peaceful, quiet 
natures, devoid of ambition, and desiring only a modest independ- 
ence and success in prosecuting their art. Horace had indeed 
fought for Brutus ; but he was no soldier, and alludes with 
humorous irony to his flight from the field of battle. ^ Virgil 
prays that he may live without glory among the forests and 
streams he loves. ^ Tibullus* and Propertius^ assert in the 
strongest terms their incapacity for an active career, praying for 
nothing more than enjoyment of the pleasures of love and song. 
Spirits lil^e these would have had no chance of rising to eminence 
amid the fierce contests of the Eepublic. Gentle and diffident, 
they needed a patron to call out their powers or protect their 
interests ; and when, under the sway of Augustus, such a patron 
was found, the rich harvest of talent that arose showed how much 
letters had hitherto suffered from the unsettled state of the times. ^ 
It is true that several writers of the preceding period survived into 
this. Men like Yarro, who kept aloof from the city, nursing in 
retirement a hopeless loyalty to the past ; men like Pollio and 
Messala, who accepted the monarchy without compromising their 
principles, and who still appeared in public as orators or jurists ; 
these, together with a few poets of the older school, such as Pui-ius' 
Bibaculus, continued to write during the first few years of the 
Augustan epoch, but cannot properly be regarded as belonging to 
if^ They pursued their own lines of thought, uninfluenced by 
the Empire, except in so far as it forced them to select more 
trivial themes, or to use greater caution in expressing their 

•^ Tibnllus vas, however, a Eoman knight. 

2 0. ii. 7, 10. Tecum Philippos et celerem fugam Sensi relicta non bene 
parmula. 

^ G. ii. 486. Flumina amem silvasque inglorius. 

^ i. 57. Non ego laudari euro mea Delia : tecum Dummodo sim, quaeso, 
segnis inersque vocer. 

^ Pr. i. 6, 29. Non ego sum laudi, non natus idoneus armis. 

^ The lack of patrons becomes a standing apology in later times for the 
poverty of literary production. 

^ Pollio, however, stands on a somewhat different footing. In his cultiva 
tion of rhetoric he must be classed with the imperial writers. 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE. 243 

thoughts. But the great authors who are the true representatives 
of Augustus's reign, Yirgil, Livy, and Horace, were brought into 
direct contact with the emperor, and much of their inspiration 
centres round his office and person. 

The conqueror of Actium was welcomed by all classes with real 
or feigned enthusiasm. To the remnant of the republican fami- 
lies, indeed, he was an object partly of flattery, partly of hatred, 
in no case, probably, of hearty approval or admiration ; but by 
the literary class, as by the great mass of the people, ho was hailed 
as the restorer of peace and good government, of order and reli- 
gion, the patron of all that was best in literature and art, the 
adopted son of that great man whose name was already a mighty 
power, and whose spirit was believed to watch over Eome as one 
of her presiding deities. It is no wonder if his opening reign 
stamped literature with new and imposing features, or if literature 
expressed her sense of his protection by a constant appeal to Ms 
name. 

Augustus has been the most fortunate of despots, for he has 
met with nothing but praise. A few harsh spirits, it seems, 
blamed him in no measured terms ; but he repaid them by a wise 
neglect, at least as long as Maecenas lived, who well knew, from 
temperament as well as experience, the value of seasonable in- 
activity. As it is, all the authors that have come to us are pane- 
gyrists. None seem to remember his early days ; all centre their 
thoughts on the success of the present and the promise of the 
future. Yet Augustus himself could not forget those times. As 
chief of the proscription, as the betrayer of Cicero, as the suspected 
murderer of the consul Hirtius, as the pitiless destroyer of Cleo- 
patra's children, he must have found it no easy task to act the 
mild ruler ; as a man of profligate conduct he must have found it 
still less easy to come forward as. the champion of decency and 
morals. He was assisted by the confidence which all, weary of 
war and bloodshed, were willing to repose in him, even to an un- 
limited extent. He was assisted also by able administrators, 
Maecenas in civil, and Agrippa in military aff'airs. But there 
were other forces making themselves felt in the great city. One 
of these was hterature, as represented by the literary class, con- 
sisting of men to whom letters were a profession not a relaxation, 
and who now first appear 2)rominently in Eome. Augustus saw 
the immense advantage of enlisting these on his side. He 
could pass laws through the senate ; he could check vice by 
punishment ; but neither his character nor his history could make 
him influence the heart of the people. To efl'ect real reforms persua- 
sive voice must be found to preach them. And who so efficacious 



244 HISTORY OF KOMAN LITERATUEE. 

as tlie band of cultured poets wliom he saw collecting round him ? 
These he deliberately set himself to win ; and that he did win then., 
some to a half-hearted, others to an absolute allegiance, is one of the 
best testimonies to his enlightened pohcy. Yet be could hardly 
have effected his object had it not been for the able co-operation of 
Maecenas, whose conciliatory manners well fitted him to be the 
friend of literary men. This astute minister formed a select circle 
of gifted authors, chiefly poets, whom he endeavoured to animate 
with the enthusiasm of succouring the state. He is said to have 
suggested to Augustus the necessity of restoring the decayed 
grandeur of the national religion. The open disregard of morality 
and religion evinced by the ambitious party-leaders during the 
Civil Wars had brought the public worship into contempt and the 
temples into ruin. Augustus determined that civil order should once 
more repose upon that reverence for the gods which had made Eome 
great. ^ Accordingly, he repaired or rebuilt many temples, and 
both by precept and example strove to restore the traditional re- 
spect for divine things. But he must have experienced a grave 
difficulty in the utter absence of religious conviction which had 
become general in Eome. The authors of the De Dlvinatione and the 
De Rernm Natura could not have written as they did, without 
influencing many minds. And if men so admirable as Cicero and 
Lucretius denied, the one the possibility of the science he pro- 
fessed, ^ the other the doctrine of Pro^ddence on which all religion 
rests, it was little likely that ordinary minds should retain much 
belief in such things. Augustus was relieved from this strait by 
the appearance of a new literary class in Eome, young authors 
from the country districts, with simpler views of life and more 
enthusiasm, of whom some at least might be willing to conse- 
•crate their talents to furthering the sacred interests on which social 
order depends. The author who fully responded to his appeal, and 
probably exceeded his highest hopes, was Virgil; but Horace, 
liivy, and Propertius, showed themselves not unwilling to espouse 
the same cause. Never was power more ably seconded by per- 
suasion ; the la^s of Augustus and the writings of Yirgil, Horace, 
and Livy, in order to be fully appreciated, must be considered in 
their connection, political and religious, with each other. 

The emperor, his minister, and his advocates, thus working for 
the same end, beyond doubt produced some effect. The Odes of 
Horace in the first three books, which are devoted to pohtics, 
show an attitude of antagonism and severe expostulation; he 

1 Dis te minorem quod geris imperas, 0. iii. 6, 5. 

2 Cicero was Augur. Admission to this office was one of the great objects 
of his ambition. 



GENERAL CHARACTEEISTICS OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE. 245 

"boldly rebukes vice, and calls upon tlie strong hand to punish 
it: 

*' Quid tristes querimoniae, 

Si non supplicio culpa reciditur? 

Quid leges sine moribus 
Vauae proficiunt ? " ^ 

But when, some years later, he wrote the Carmen Saeculare, and 
the fourth book of the Odes, his voice is raised in a psean of 
unmixed triumph. "The pure home is polluted by no un- 
chastity; law and morahty have destroyed crime; matrons are 
blessed with children resembling their fathers ; already faith and 
peace, honour and maiden modesty, have returned to us," &c.2 
This can hardly be mere exaggeration, though no doubt the 
picture is coloured, since the popularity of Ovid's Art of Love^ 
even during Horace's lifetime, is a sufficient proof that profligacy 
did not lack its votaries. 

To the student of human development the most interesting 
feature in this attempted reform of manners is the universal ten- 
dency to connect it with the deification of the emperor. It was 
in vain that Augustus claimed to return to the old paths ; every- 
where he met this new apotheosis of himself crowning the re- 
stored edifice of belief ; so impossible was it for him, as for others, 
to reconstruct the past. As the guardian of the people's material 
welfare, he became, despite of himself, the people's chief divinity. 
From the time that Virgil's gratitude expressed itself in the first 
Eclogue — 

*' Namque erit ille mihi semper deus : illiiis aram 
Saepe tener nostris ab ovilibus imbuet agnus,"* 

the emperor was marked out for this new form of adulation, and 
succeeding poets only added to what Virgil had begun. Even in 
his Epistles, where the conventionalities of mythology are never 
employed, Horace compares him with the greatest deities, and 
declares that altars are raised to his name, while all confess him 
to be the greatest person that has been or will be among man- 
kind.'* Propertius and Ovid ^ accept this language as proper and 
natural, and the striking rapidity with which it established itseK 
in universal use is one of the most speaking signs of the growing 
degeneracy. Augustus himself was not cajoled, Tiberius still 
less, but Caius and his successors were ; even Vespasian, when 
dying, in jest or earnest used the words " ut puto deus fio." As 

1 Od. iii. 24, 33. 2 C. S. 57; 0. iv. 5, 21. 

8 Eel. i. 7. * Ep. ii. 1, 16. 

« Prop. iii. 4, 1 ; Ovid Tr. iii. 1, 78. 



L 



246 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURK. 

tlie satirist says, " Power will believe anything tliat Flattery sug- 
gests."! 

Side by side witb tbis religious cultus of tbe emperor was a 
willingness to surrender all political power into bis bands. Little 
by little be engrossed all tbe otbces of state, and so completely 
bad proscription and indulgence in turn done tbeir work tbat 
none were found bold enough to resist these insidious encroach- 
ments. ^ The privileges of tbe senate and the rights of the people 
were gradually abridged ; and tbat pernicious policy so congenial 
to a despotism, of satisfying the appetite for food and amusement 
and so keeping tbe people quiet, was inaugurated early in bis 
reign, and set moving in the lines which it long afterwards 
followed. Freedom of debate, which had been universal in tbe 
senate, was curtailed by the knowledge that, as often as not, tbe 
business was being decided by a secret council held within tbe 
palace. Eloquence could not waste itself in abstract discussions ; 
and even if it attempted to speak, the growing servility made it 
perilous to utter plain truths. Thus the sphere of public speak- 
ing was greatly restricted. Those who had poured forth before 
tbe assembled people tbe torrents of their oratory were now by 
what Tacitus so graphically calls tbe pacification of eloquence* 
confined to tbe tamer arena of the civil law courts. All those 
who felt that without a practical object eloquence cannot exist, 
bad to resign themselves to silence. Others less serious-minded 
found a sphere for tbeir natural gift of speech in tbe balls of 
the rhetoricians. It is pitiable to see men like Pollio content to 
give up all higher aims, and for want of healthier exercise waste 
their powers in noisy declamation. 

History, if treated with dignity and candour, was almost as 
dangerous a field as eloquence. Hence we find tbat few were 
bold enough to cultivate it. Livy, indeed, succeeded in produc-' 
ing a great masterwork, which, while it did not conceal bis 
Pompeian sympathies, entered so heartily into the emperor's 
general point of view as to receive high praise at bis bands. But 
Livy was not a politician. Those who bad been politicians found 

^ This subject is discussed in an essay by Gaston Boissier in the first 
volume of La Religion romaine cVAuguste mix Antonitis. 

2 Tm. Ann. i. 2, Ubi militem donis, populum annona, cunctos duicedine 
otii pellexit, insurgere paulatim, munia senatus rnagistratuum legum in se 
trahere, nuUo adversante, cum ferocissimi per acies aut proscriptione cecidis- 
sent, ceteri nobilium, quantc quis servitio promptior, opibus et honoribus 
extollerentur, ac novis ex rebus aucti tuta et praesentia quam Vetera et peri- 
culosa niallent. 

^ Cum divus Augustus sicut caetera eloquentiam pacaverat. — De Catiss. 
Corr. Moq. 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE. 247 

it unwise to provoke tlie jealousy of Augustus by expressing their 
sentiments. Hence neither Messala nor Pollio continued their 
works on contemporary history; a deprivation which we cannot 
but strongly feel, as we have few trustworthy accounts of those 
times. 

In law Augustus trenched less on the independent thought of 
the jurists, but at the same time was better able to put forth his 
prerogative when occasion was really needed. His method of 
accrediting the Responsa Prudentum, by permitting only those 
who had his authorisation to exercise that profession, was an able 
stroke of policy.^ It gave the profession as it were the safeguard 
of a diploma, and veiled an act of despotic power under the form 
of a greater respect for law. The science of jurisprudence was 
ably represented by various professors, but it became more and 
more involved and difficult, and frequently draws forth from the 
satirists abuse of its quibbling intricacies. 

Poetry was the form of literature to which most favour was 
shown, and which flourished more vigorously than any other. 
The pastoral, and the metrical epistle, were now first introduced. 
The former was based on the Theocritean idyll, but does not seem 
to have been well adapted to Roman treatment ; the latter was of 
two kinds ; it was either a real communication on some subject of 
mutual interest, as that of Horace, or else an imaginary expression 
of feeling put into the mouth of a mythical hero or heroine, of 
which the most brilliant examples are those of Ovid. Philosophy 
and science flourished to a considerable extent. The desire to 
find some compensation for the loss of all outward activity led 
many to strive after the ideal of conduct presented by stoicism : 
and nearly all earnest minds were more or less affected by this 
great system. Livy is reported to have been an eloquent ex- 
pounder of philosophical doctrines, and most of the poets show a 
strong leaning to its study. Augustus wrote adhortationes, and 
beyond doubt his example was often followed. The speculative 
and therefore inoffensive topics of natural science were neither 
encouraged nor neglected by Augustus ; Yitruvius, the architect, 
having showed some capacity for engineering, was kindly received 
by him, but his treatise, admirable as it is, does not seem to have 
secured him any special favour. It was such writers as he thought 
might be made instruments of his policy that Augustus set him- 
self specially to encourage by every means in his power. The 
result of this patronage was an increasing divergence from the 

^ Pompon Dig. I. 2, 2.47 (quoted by Teuffel). Primus Divus Augustus, ut 
maior iuris aucioritas haberettir, constituit ut ex auctoritate eius res])on- 
derent. 



248 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

popular taste on the part of tlie poets, who now aspired only to 
please the great and learned.^ It is pleasing, however, to observe 
the entire absence of ill-feeling that reigned in this society of beaux 
esprits with regard to one another. Each held his own special 
position, but all were equally welcome at the great man's reunions, 
equally acceptable to one another; and each criticised the other's 
works with the freedom of a literary freemasonry. ^ This select 
cultivation of poetry reacted unfavourably on the thought and 
imagination, though it greatly elevated the style of those that 
employed it. The extreme delicacy of the artistic product shows 
it to have been due to some extent to careful nursing, and its 
ahnost immediate collapse confirms this conclusion. 

"While Augustus, through Maecenas, united men eminent for 
taste and culture in a literary coterie, Messala, who had never 
joined the successful side, had a similar but smaller following, 
among whom was numbered the poet Tibullus. At the tables of 
these great men met on terms of equal companionship their own 
friends and the authors whom they favoured or assisted. For 
though the provincial poet could not, like those of the last age, 
assume the air of one who owned no superior, but was bound by 
ties of obligation as well as gratitude to his patron, still the works 
of Horace and Virgil abundantly prove that servile compliment 
was neither expected by him nor would have been given by them, 
as it was too frequently in the later period to the lasting injury 
of literature as well as of character. The great patrons were 
themselves men of letters. Augustus was a severe critic of style, 
and, when he wrote or spoke, did not fall below the high standard 
he exacted from others. Suetonius and Tacitus bear witness to 
the clearness and dignity of his public speaking, ^ 

Maecenas, as we shall notice immediately, was, or affected to 
be, a writer of some pretension ; and Messala's eloquence was of 
so high an order, that had he been allowed the opportunity of 
freely using it, he would beyond doubt have been numbered 
among the great orators of Eome. 

Such was the state of thought and politics which surrounded 
and brought out the celebrated writers whom we shall now 
proceed to criticise, a task the more delightful, as these writers 
are household words, and their best works familiar from child- 

^ Odiprofamim vulgus et arceo (Hor. Od. iii. 1, 1), Parca dedit malignum 
spcrnere valgus (id. ii. 16, 39), satis est eqidtcm viiM plandcre i^Sat, 1. >. 77), 
and often. So Ovid, Fast. I. exordium. 

2 See the pleasing description in the ninth Satire of Horace's fiist 
book. 

3 Suet. Aug. 84. Tac. An. xiii. 3. 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE. 249 

hood to all who have been educated to love the beautiful in 
literature. 

The excellent literary judgment shown by Augustus contributed 
to encourage a high standard of taste among the rival authors. 
How weighty the sovereign's influence was may be gathered from 
the extravagancies into which the ISTeronian and Flavian authors 
fell through anxiety to please monarchs of corrupt taste. The 
advantages of patronage to literature are immense ; but it is indis- 
pensable that the patron should himself be great. The people were 
now so totally without literary culture that a popular poet would 
necessarily have been a bad poet ; careful writers turned from 
them to the few who could appreciate what was excellent. Yet 
Maecenas, so judicious as a patron, fell as an author into the 
very faults he blamed. During the years he held ofhce (30-8 
B.C.) he devoted some fragments of his busy days to composing 
in prose and verse vrritings which Augustus spoke of as "/xvpo- 
^/oexets cincinni" "curled locks reeking with ointment." We 
hear of a treatise called Prometheus, certain dialogues, among them 
a Symposium, in which Messala, Yirgil, and Horace were intro- 
duced ; and Horace implies that he had planned a prose history 
of Augustus's wars.^ He did not shrink from attempting, and 
what was worse, publishing, poetry, which bore imprinted on it 
the characteristics of his efieminate mind. Seneca quotes one 
passage 2 from which we may form an estimate of his level as a 
versifier. But, however feeble in execution, he was a skilful 
adviser of others. The wisdom of his counsels to Augustus is 
known ; those he offered to Yirgil were equally sound. It was 
he who suggested the plan of the Gcorgics, and the poet acknow- 
ledges his debt for a great idea in the words " Nil altum sine te 
meas inclioat." He was at once cautious and liberal in bestowing 
his friendship. The length of time that elapsed between his 
first reception of Horace and his final enrolment of the poet 
among his intimates, shows that he was not hasty in awarding 
patronage. And the difficulty which Propertius encountered in 
gaining a footing among his circle proves that even great talent 
was not by itself a sufficient claim on his regard. As we shall 
have occasion to mention him again, we shall pass him over here, 
and conclude the chapter with a short account of the earliest 

1 Tuque peclcstrilms Dices historiis inadia Caesaris Maecenas melius 
dudaque iKT vias Ecgum coHa minacium (Od. ii. 12, 9). 

2 Ep. 101, 11. I quote it to show what his sentiments were on a point 
that touched a Roman nearly, the fear of death : Dehilem faciio vianu 
dchilem pede coxa : Tuhc7' astrue gibberuvi, luhricos quale denies : Vita dum 
siqjcrcst, bene est : hanc mihivel acuta Si scdcam crucc siistine. 



250 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

Augustan poet whose name lias come to us, L. Varius Eufus 
(64 B.C.-9 A.D.), the friend of Virgil, who introduced both him 
and Horace to Maecenas's notice, and who was for some years 
accounted the chief epic poet of Rome.^ 

Born in Cisalpine Gaul, Varius was, like all his countrymen, 
warmly attached to Caesar's cause, and seems to have made his 
reputation by an epic on Caesar's death. ^ Of this poem we have 
scattered notices implying that it was held in high esteem, and a 
fragment is preserved by Macrobius,^ which it is worth while to 
quote : 

** Ceu canis umbrosam lustrans Gortynia vallem, 
Si veteris potuit cervae comprendere lustra, 
Saevit in absentem, et circum vestigia lustrans 
Aethera per nitidum tenues sectatur odores; 
Kon amnes illam medii non ardua tentant, 
Perdita nee serae mcminit decedere nocti." 

The rhythm here is midway betw^een Lucretius and Virgil; the 
inartistic repetition of lustrans together with the use immediately 
.before of the cognate word lustra point to a certain carelessness 
in composition ; the employment of epithets is less delicate than 
in Horace and Virgil ; the last line is familiar from its introduc- 
tion unaltered, except by an improved punctuation, into the 
Eclogues.^ Two fine verses, slightly modified in expression but 
not in rhythm, have found their way into the Aeneid.^ 

*' Veiididit hie Latium populis, agrosque Quiritum 
Eripuit: fixit leges pretio atque retixit." 

Besides this poem he wrote another on the praises of Augustus, 
for which Horace testifies his fitness while excusing himself from 
approaching the same subject.^ From this were taken two lines'" 
appropriated by Horace, and instanced as models of graceful 
flattery : 

" Tene magis salvum populus yelit, an populum tu, 

Servet in ambiguum qui consulit et tibi et Urbi, 

Jupiter." 

After the pre-eminence of Virgil began to be recognised, Varius 
seems to have deserted eptic poetry and turned his attention to 
tragedy, and that with so much success, that his great work, the 
ThyesteSy was that on which his fame with posterity chiefly rested 
This drama, considered by Quintilian^ equal to any of the Greek 

^ He was so when Horace wrote his first book of Satires (x. 51). Forte 
epos accr lU nemo Varius clucit. 

^ Often quoted as the poem de Mo7'te. * Sat. vi. 2. 

^ Eel. viii. 5, '6'&, ^j7'oc?«n&z7, in ulva Perdita, tiec serae, &c. Observe how 
Virgil improves Avhile he borrows. 

5 Aen. vi. 621, 2. ~ « Od. i. 61. 

7 So says the Schol. on Hor. Ep. I. xvi. 25. « X. i. 98. 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE. 251 

masterpieces, was performed at the games after the battle of 
Actium ; but it was probably better adapted for declaiming than 
acting. Its high reputation makes its loss a serious one — not for 
its intrinsic value, but for its position in the history of literature 
as the first of those rhetorical dramas of which we possess examples 
in those of Seneca, and which, with certain modifications, have been 
cultivated in our own century with so much spirit by Byron, 
Shelley, and S^^dnburne. The main interest which Yarius has for 
us arises from his having, in company with Plotius Tucca, edited 
the Aeneid after Virgil's death. The intimate friendship that 
existed between the two poets enabled Yarius to give to the world 
many particulars as to Yirgil's character and habits of life ; this 
biographical sketch, which formed probably an introduction to the 
volume, is referred to by Quintilian^ and others. 

A poet of inferior note, but perhaps handed down to unenviable 
immortality in the line of Yirgil — 

*' Argutos inter strepere Anser olores,"^ 
was Anser. He was a partisan of Antony, and from this fact, to- 
gether with the possible allusion in the Eclogues, later grammarians 
discovered that he was, like Bavius and Maevius, unhappy bards 
only known from the contemptuous allusions of their betters,^ an 
ohtredator Virgilii. As such he of course called down the vials 
of their wrath. But there is no real evidence for the charge. He 
seems to have been an unambitious poet, who indulged light and 
wanton themes.* Aemilius Maceb, of Yerona, who died 16 B.C., 
was certainly a friend of Yirgil, and has been supposed to be the 
Mopsus of the Eclogues. He devoted his very moderate talents 
to minute and technical didactic poems. The Omitliogonias of 
Kicander was imitated or translated by him, as well as the ©rjptaKa 
of the same writer. Ovid mentions having been frequently present 
at the jDoet's recitations, but as he does not praise them,^ we way 
infer that Macer had no great name among his contemporaries, but 
owed his consideration and perhaps his literary impulse to his 
friendship for Yirgil. 

1 X. 3. 8. 2 Ec. h i*^. S Yfyg. Ec. iii. 90 ; Hor. Epod. x. 

* " Cinna procacior,'^ Ov. Trist. ii. 435. 

* Saepe stias volucres legit mihi grandior aevo, Quaeque necet sciyens, quae 
iv/vet herba Macer. Trist. iv. 10, 43. Quint, (x. 1, 87) calls him humilis. 



CHAPTEE IL 

Virgil (70-19 b.c). 

PuBLius YiRGiLius, or more correctly, Vergilius^ Maro, was Lorn 
in the village or district^ of Andes, near Mantua, sixteen years 
after the birth of Catullus, of whom he was a compatriot as well 
as an admirer.^ As the citizenship was not conferred on Gallia 
Transpadana, of which Mantua was a chief town, until 49 B.C., 
when Virgil was nearly twenty-ene years old, he had no claim by 
birth to the name of Eoman. And yet so intense is the patriot- 
ism which animates his poems, that no other Eoman writer, 
patrician or plebeian, surpasses or even equals it in depth of feel- 
ing. It is one proof out of many how completely the power of 
Eome satisfied the desire of the Italians for a great common head 
whom they might reverence as the heaven-appointed representa- 
tive of their race. And it leads' us to reflect on the narrow pride 
of the great city in not earlier extending her full franchise to aU 
those gallant tribes who fought so well for her, and who at last 
extorted their demand with grievous loss to themselves as to her, 
by the harsh argument of the sword. To return to Virgil. We 
learn nothing from his own works as to his early life and parentage. 
Our chief authority is Donatus. His father, Maro, was in humble 
circumstances ; according to some he followed the trade of a potter. 
But as he farmed his own little estate, he must have been far 
removed from indigence, and we know that he was able to give 
his illustrious son the best education the time aff^orded. Trained 
in the simple virtues of the country, Virgil, like Horace, never 
lost his admiration for the stern and almost Spartan ideal of life 
which he had there witnessed, and which the levity of the capital 
only placed in stronger relief. After attending school for some 
years at Cremona, he assumed at sixteen the manly gown, on the 
very day to which tradition assigns the death of the poet Lucretius. 

^ See Sellar's Virgil, p. 107. 

2 Pagus does not meau merely the village, "but rather the village with its 
suiTonndino-s as defined by the goveininent survey, something like our parish 
^ Mantua vae miserae nimium vicina Creynonae, Eel. 9. 27. 



LIFE OF VIRGIL. * 253 

Some time later (53 b.c.), we find him at Eome studying rhetoric 
under Epidius, and soon afterwards philosophy under Siro the 
Epicurean. The recent publication of Lucretius's poem must have 
invested Siro's teaching with new attractiveness in the eyes of a 
young author, conscious of genius, but as yet self-distrustful, and 
willing to humble his mind before the " temple of speculative 
truth." The short piece, written at this date, and showing his 
state of feeKng, deserves to be quoted : — 

*' Ite liinc inanes ite rhetonim ampullae . , . 
Scliolasti coram natio madens pmgui : . , , 
Tuque o mearum cura, Sexte, curaram 
Vale Sabine : iam valete formosi. 
Nos ad beatos vela mittimus portns 
Magni petentes docta dicta Sironis, 
Vitamque ab omni vindicabimus cura, 
Ite hinc Camenae . . . 
Dulces Camenae, nam (fatelaimur verum) 
Dulces fuistis : et tamen meas chartas 
Eevisitote, sed pudenter et varo." 

These few lines are very interesting, first, as enabling us to trace 
the poetic influence of Catullus, whose style they greatly resemble, 
though their moral tone is far more serious ; secondly, as shomng 
us that Yirgil was in aristocratic company, the names mentioned, 
and the epithet formosi, by which the young nobles designated 
themselves, after the Greek K-aAoi, KaXoKayaOoi, indicating as much ; 
and thirdly, as evincing a serious desire to embrace philosophy for 
his guide in life, after a conflict with himself as to whether he 
should give up writing poetry, and a final resolution to indulge his 
natural taste "seldom and without licentiousness." We can hardly 
err in tracing this awakened earnestness and its direction upon the 
Epicurean system to his first acquaintance with the poem of Lucre- 
tius. The enthusiasm for philosophy expressed in these lines 
remained with Virgil all his life. Poet as he was, he would at 
once be drawn to the theory of the universe so eloquently pro- 
pounded by a brother-poet. And in all his works a deep study of 
Lucretius is evidenced not only by imitations of his language, but 
by frequent adoption of his views and a recognition of his position 
as the loftiest attainable by man.^ The young Eomans at this 
time took an eager interest in the problems .which philosophy 
presents, and most literary men began their career as disciples of 
the Lucretian theory. ^ Experience of life, however, generally drew 
them away from it. Horace professed to have been converted by 

^ In the celebrated passage Felix qui potuit, &c. 

' Horace certainly diil, and that in a more thorough manner than Virgil. 
See his remark at the end of the Iter ad Brundisium, and other well-knowa 
passages. 



254 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

a thunder-clap in a clear sky ; this was no doubt irony, hut it k 
clear that in his epistles he has ceased to be an Epicurean. Virgil, 
who in the Eclogues and Georgics seems to sigh with regret after 
the doctrines he fears to accept, conies forward in the Aeneid as 
the staunch adherent of the national creed, and where he acts the 
philosopher at all, assumes the garb of a Stoic, not an Epicurean. 
But he still desired to spend his later days in the pursuit of truth; 
it seemed as if he accepted almost with resignation the labours of 
a poet, and looked forward to philosophy as his recompense and 
the goal of his constant desire.^ We can thus trace a continuity 
of interest in the deepest problems, lasting throughout his life, 
and, by the sacrifice of one side of his affections, tinging his mind 
with that subtle melancholy so difficult to analyse, but so irresis- 
tible in its charm. The craving to rest the mind upon a solid 
ground of truth, which was kept in abeyance under the Republic 
by the incessant calls of active life, now asserted itself in all 
earnest characters, and would not be content without satisfaction. 
Virgil was cut off before his philosophical development was com- 
pleted, and therefore it is useless to speculate what views he would 
have finally espoused. But it is clear that his tone of mind was 
in reality artistic and not philosophical. Systems of thought 
could never have had real power over him except in so far as they 
modified his conceptions of ideal beauty : he possessed neither the 
grasp nor the boldness requisite for speculative thought ; all ideas 
as they were presented to his mind were unconsciously transfused 
into materials for effects of art. And the little poem which has 
led to these remarks seems to enshrine in the outpourings of an 
early enthusiasm the secret of that divided allegiance between his 
real and his fancied aptitudes, which impels the poet's spirit, while 
it hears the discord, to win its way into the inner and more perfect 
harmony. 

After the battle of Philippi (42 b.c.) he appears settled in his 
native district cultivating pastoral poetry, but threatened with 
ejection by the agrarian assignations of the Triumvirs. Pollio, 
who was then Prefect of Gallia Transpadana, interceded with 
Octavian, and Virgil was allowed to retain his property. But on 
a second division among the veterans. Varus having now succeeded 
to Pollio, he was not so fortunate, but with his father was obliged 
to fly for his life, an event which he has alluded to in the first and 
ninth Eclogues. The fugitives took refuge in a villa that had 

■^ Contrast tlie way in which he speaks of poetical studies, G. iv. 564, 
me dulcis alehat Tarthenojpe studiis florentem ignohilis oti, with the language 
of his letter to Augustus (Macrob. i. 24, 11), cum alia quoque stvdia ad id 
<ypus multoque ^otiora (i.e. philosojjhy) itn^cniar. 



LIFE OF VIRGIL. 255 

belonged to Siro,^ and from this retreat, by tlie advice of bis friend 
Cornelius Gallus, he removed to Eome, where, 37 B.C., he published 
his Eclogues. These at once raised him to eminence as the equal 
of Yarius, though in a different department; but even before their 
publication he had established himself as an honoured member of 
Maecenas's circle. ^ The liberality of Augustus and his owntlirift 
enabled him to live in opulence, and leave at his death a very 
considerable fortune. Among other estates he possessed one in 
Campania, at or near Naples, which from its healthfulness and 
beauty continued till his death to be his favourite dwelling-place. 
It was there that he wrote the Georgics, and there that his bones 
were laid, and his tomb made the object of affectionate and even 
religious veneration. He is not known to have undertaken more 
than one voyage out of Italy; but that contemplated in the third 
Ode of Horace may have been carried out, as Prof. Sellar suggests, 
for the sake of informing himself by personal observation about 
the localities of the Aeneid; for it seems unlikely that the accurate 
descriptions of Book III. could have been written without some 
such direct knowledge. The rest of his life presents no event 
worthy of record. It was given wholly to the cultivation of his 
art, except in so far as he was taken up with scientllic and anti- 
quarian studies, which he felt to be effectual in lilevating his 
thought and deepening his grasp of a great subject.^ The Georgics 
were composed at the instance of Maecenas during the seven years 
37-30 B.C., and read before Augustus the following year. The 
Aeneid was written during the remaining years of his life, but was 
left unfinished, the poet having designed to give three more years 
to its elaboration. As is well known, it was saved from destruction 
and given to the world by the emperor's command, contrary to the 
poet's dying wish and the express injunctions of his will He 
died at Brundisium (19 B.C.) at the comparatively early age of 51, 
of an illness contracted at Megara, and aggravated by a too hurried 
return. The tour on which he had started was undertaken from 
a desire to see for himself the coasts of Asia Minor which he had 
made Aeneas visit. Such was the life and such the premature 
death of the greatest of Eoman bards. 

Even those who have judged the poems of Yirgil most unfavour- 
ably speak of his character in terms of warmest praise. He was 

^ This is alluded to in a little poem (Catal. 10): "Villula quae Sironiseras 
et pauper agelle, Verum illi domino tu quoque divitiae : Me tibi, et hos una 
mecwn et quos semper amavi. . . . Commendo,inprimisquepatrem; tununo 
eris illi Mantua quod fuerat, quodque Cremona prius." We observe the 
growing peculiarities of Virgil's style. 
, 2 See Hor. S. L ^ and 10. 3 Macrob. i. 24. See note, p. 5. 



256 HISTOKY OF EOMAN LITEKATUKE. 

gentle, innocent, modest, and of a singular sweetness of disposition, 
wMcli inspired affection even where it was not returned, and in 
men who rarely showed it.^ At the same time he is described as 
silent and even awkward in society, a trait which Dante may have 
remembered when himself taunted with the same deficiency. His 
nature was pre-eminently a religious one. Dissatisfied with his 
own excellence, filled with a deep sense of the unapproachable 
ideal, he reverenced the ancient faith and the opinions of those 
who had expounded it. This habit of mind led him to underrate 
his own poetical genius and to attach too great weight to the 
precedente and judgment of others. He seems to have thought 
no writer so common-place as not to yield some thought that he 
might make his own; and, like Milton, he loves to pay the tribute 
of a passing allusion to some brother poet, whose , character he 
valued, or whose talent his ready sympathy understood. In an age 
when licentious writing, at least in youth, was the rule and 
required no apology, Virgil's early poems are conspicuous by its 
almost total absence; while the G-eorgics and Aeneid maintain a 
standard of lofty purity to which nothing in Latin, and few works 
in any literature, approach. His flattery of Augustus has been 
censured as a fault; but up to a certain point it was probably 
quite sincere. His early intimacy with Varius, the Caesarian poet, 
and possibly the general feeling among his fellow provincials, may 
have attracted him from the first to Caesar's name; his disposition, 
deeply affected by power or greatness, naturally incluied him to 
show loyalty to a person; and the spell of success when won on 
such a scale as that of Augustus doubtless wrought upon his 
poetical genius. Still, no considerations can make us justify 
the terms of divine homage which he applies in all his poems, and 
with every variety of ornament, to the emperor. Indeed, it would 
be inconceivable, were it not certain, that the truest representative 
of his generation could, with the approbation of all the world, use 
language which, but a single generation before, would have called 
forth nothing but scorn. 

Virgil was tall, dark, and interesting-lookiug, rather than hand- 
some; his health was dehcate, and besides a weak digestion, ^ he suf- 
fered lilie other students from headache. His industry must, in spite 
of this, have been extraordinary; for he shows an intimate acquain- 
tance not only with all that is eminent in Greek and Latin litera- 
ture, but with many recondite departments of ritual, antiquities, 
and phLlosophy,^ besides being a true interpreter of nature, an 

^ As Horace. Od. I. iii, 4 : *' Animae dimidium meae." Cf. S. i. 5, 40. 
* '^ Namqae pila Ui^pis inimicum ei ludere crudis.'" Hor. S. i. v. 49. 
3 ^^ A ;penitissi7rta Ghraecorum, doctrirta.^' Macr. v. 22, 15. 



THE MINOR POEMS. 257 

excellence tliat does not come ^tliout^the habit as well as tho 
love of converse witli lier. Of Ms personal feelings we know but 
little, for be never shows that unreserve which characterises so 
many of the Eonian writers; but he entertained a strong and lasting 
friendship for Gallus,i and the force and truth of his delineations 
of the passion of love seem to point to personal experience. Like 
Horace, he never married, and his last days are said to have been 
clouded with regret for the unfinished condition of his great work. 

The early efforts of Virgil were chiefly lyric and elegiac pieces 
after the manner of Catullus, whom he studied with the greatest 
care, and two short poems in hexameters, both taken from the 
Alexandrines, called Culex and Moretum, of which the latter alone 
is certainly, the formerly possibly, genuine. ^ Among the short 
pieces called Catalecta we have some of exquisite beauty, as the 
dedicatory prayer to Yenus and the address to Siro's villa f others 
show a vein of invective which we find it hard to associate with 
the gentle poet f others, again, are parodies or close imitations of 
Catullus f while one or two^ are proved by internal evidence to be 
by another hand than Virgil's. The Copa^ "Mine Hostess," 
which closes the series, reminds us of Virgil in its expression, 
rhythm, and purity of style, but is far more lively than anything 
we possess of his. It is an invitation to a rustic friend to put up 
his beast and spend the hot hours in a leafy arbour where wine, 
fruits, and goodly company wait for him. We could wish the 
first four lines away, and then the poem would be a perfect gem. 
Its clear joyous ring marks the gay time of youth ; its varied 
music sounds the prelude to the metrical triumphs that were to 
come, and if it is not Virgil's, we have lost in its author a genre 
poet of the rarest power. 

The Moretum is a pleasing idjdl, descril)ing the daily life of the 
peasant Simplus, translated probably from the Greek of Parthenius. 
On it Teuffel says, "Suevius had written a Moretum, and it is 
not improbable that the desire to surpass Suevius influenced 
Virgil in attempting the same task again. "^ Trifling as this 
circumstance is, nothing that throws any light on the growth of 
Virgil's muse can be wanting in interest. Virgil was not one of 
those who startle the world by their youthful genius. His soul 
was indeed a poet's from the iirst, but the rich perfection of his 
verse was not developed until after years of severe labour, self- 

* *' Gallo cuius amor tantum mihi crcscit in horas. 

Quantum vere novo xiridis se suhiicit ahnis." — Eel. x. 73 

* The Ciris and Aetna formerly attributed to him are obviously spurious. 

* vi. and x. ^ lii. iv. ^ viii. ix. <* v. vii. 
^ Macrob. Sat. iii. 98, 19, calls Suevius vir doc'i^biiaus. 



258 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

correction, and even failure. He began by essaying various styles ; 
he gradually confined himself to one ; and in that one he "wrought 
unceasingly, always bringing method to aid talent, until, through 
various grades of immaturity, he passed to a perfection peculiarly 
his own, in which thought and expression are fused with such 
exceeding art as to elude all attempts to disengage them. If we 
can accept the Culex in its present form as genuine, the develop- 
ment of Virgil'^ genius is shown to us in a still earlier stage. 
"Whether he wrote it at sixteen or twenty-six (and to us the latter 
age seems infinitely the more probable), it bears the strongest 
impress of immaturity. It is true the critics torment us by their 
doubts. Some insist that it cannot be by Virgil. Their chief 
arguments are derived from the close resemblances (which they 
regard as imitations) to many passages in the Aeneid ; but of 
these another, and perhaps a mo]'e plausible, explanation may be 
given. The hardest argument to meet is that drawn from the extra- 
ordinary imperfection of the plot, which mars the whole consistency 
of the poem;i but even this is not incompatible with Virgil's 
authorship. For aU ancient testimony agrees in regarding the 
Culex of Virgil as a poem of little merit. ^ Amid the uncertainty 
which surrounds the subject, it seems best not to disturb the 
verdict of antiquity, until better grounds are discovered for assign- 
ing our present poem to a later hand. To us the evidence seems 
to point to the Virgilian authorship. The defect in the plot marks 
a fault to which Virgil certainly was prone, and which he never 
quite cast off.^ The correspondences with the mythology, lan- 
guage, and rhythm of Virgil are just such as might be explained 
by supposing them to be his first opening conceptions on these 
points, which assumed afterwards a more developed form.* And 

^ "The original motive of the poem can only have been the idea that the 
gnat could not rest in Hades, and therefore asked the shepherd whose life it 
had saved, for a decent burial. But this very motive, without which the 
whole poem loses its consistency, is wanting in the extant Culex." — 
Tcuffel, R. L. § 225, 1, 4. 

2 Its being edited separately from Yirgil's works is thought by Teuffel to 
indicate spuriousuess. But there is good evidence for believing that the 
poem accepted as Virgil's by Statins and Martial was our present Culex. 
Teuffel thinks they were mistaken, but that is a bold conjecture. 

^ The missing the gist of the story, of which Teuffel complains, does not 
seem to us worse than the glaring inconsistency at the end of the sixth book 
of the Aeneid, where Aeneas is dismissed by the gate of the false visions. 
That incident, whether ironical or not, is unquestionably an artistic blunder, 
since it destroys the impression of truth on which the justification of the 
book depends. 

* For instance, v. 291, Sed tu crudcUs, crudelis tu magis Orpheu looks 
more like an imperfect anticipation than an imitation of Iinprobus ille jmer 



THE ECLOGUES. 259 

this is tlie more probable because Virgil's mind created with 
labour, and cast and re-cast in the crucible of reflection ideas of 
which the first expression suggested itself in early life. Thus we 
find in the Aeneid similes which had occurred in a less finished 
form in the Georgics ; in both Georgics and Aeneid phrases or 
cadences which seem to brood over and strive to reproduce half- 
forgotten originals wrought out long before. Nothing is more 
interesting in tracing Virgil's genius, than to note how each fullest 
development of his talent subsumes and embraces those that had 
gone before it ; how his mind energises in a continuous mould, 
and seems to harp with almost jealous constancy on strings it has 
once touched. The deeper we study him, the more clearly is this 
feature seen. Unlike other poets who throw off their stanzas and 
rise as if freed from a load, Virgil seems to carry the accumulated 
burden of his creations about with him. He imitates himself 
with the same elaborate assimilation by which he digests and 
reproduces the thoughts of others. 

It is probable that Virgil suppressed all his youthful poetry, 
and intended the Eclogues to be regarded as the first-fruits of Ins 
genius.^ The pastoral had never yet been cultivated at Eome. 
Of all the products of later Greece none could vie with it in 
truth to nature. Its Sicilian origin bespoke a fresh inspiration, 
for it arose in a land where the muse of Hellas still lingered. 
Theocritus's vivid delineation of country scenes must have been 
full of charm to the Eomans, and Virgil did well to try to natura- 

crudelis tu quoque mater. Again, v. 293, parvum si Tartara possent pec 
catum igiiovisse, is surely a feeble effort to say scirent si ignoscere Manes, not 
a reproduction of it ; v. 201, Ercbo cit equos Nox could hardly have been 
written after ruit Oceaiio nox. From an examination of the similarities of 
diction, I should incline to regard them as in nearly every case admitting 
naturally of this explanation. The portraits of Tisiphone, the Heliades, 
Orpheus, and the tedious list of heroes, Greek, Trojan, and Roman, who 
dwell in the shades, are difficult to pronounce upon. They might be ex- 
tremely bad copies, but it is simpler to regard them as crude studies, unless 
indeed we suppose the versifier to have introduced them with the express 
design of making the Culex a good imitation of a juvenile poem. Minute 
points which make for an early date are meritus (v. 209), cf. fultus hyacintho 
(Eci. 6) ; the rhythms cognitus utilitate manet (v. 65), implacabilis iranimis 
(v. 237) ; the form vidcreque {v. 304) ; the use of the pass, part, with ace, (v, 
iii. 175); of alliteration (v. 122, 188) ; asyndeton (v, 178, 190) ; juxtaposi- 
tions like revoluhile volvens (v. 168) ; compounds like inevcctus (v, 100, 340) ; 
all which are paralleled in Lucr. and Virg. but hardly known in later poets. 
The chief feature which makes the other way is the extreme rarity of elisions, 
which, as a rule, are frequent in Virg. Here we have as many as twenty- 
two lines without elision. But we know that Virgil became more archaic 
in his style as he grew older, 

1 Molle atqioe facetum Virgilio armuerunt gicadentes ru/re cametiae. — SaU 
LX. 45. 



260 HISTOllY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

lise it. Not even Ms matcliless grace, however, could atone for 
the want of reality that pervades an imported type of art. 
Sicilian shepherds, Eoman literati, sometimes under a rustic 
disguise, sometimes in their own person ; a landscape drawn, now 
from the vales round Syracuse, now from the poet's o^vn district 
round Mantua ; playful contests between rural bards interspersed 
with panegyrics on Julius Caesar and the patrons or benefactors 
of the poet ; a continual mingling of allegory with fiction, of 
genuine rusticity with assumed coiu^tliness ; such are the incon- 
gruities which lie on the very surface of the Eclogues. Add to these 
the continual imitations, sometimes sinning against the rules of 
scholarship,^ which make them, with all their beauties, by far the 
least original of Virgil's works, the artificial character of the 
whole composition, and the absence of that lofty self-conscious- 
ness on the poet's part^ which lends so much fire to his after 
works : and it may seem surprising that the Eclogues have been so 
much admired. But the fact is, their irresistible charm outweighs 
all the exceptions of criticism. Wliile we read we become like 
Virgil's own shepherd ; we cannot choose but surrender ourselves 
to the magic influence : 

" Tale tuum carmen nobis, divine poeta, 
Quale sopor fessis in gramine, quale per herbam 
Dulcis aquae saliente sitim restingueie rivo."^ 

This charm is due partly to the skill with which the poet has 
blended reality with allegory, fancy with feeling, partly to the 
exquisite language to which their music is attuned. The Latin lan- 
guage had now reached its critical period of growth, its splendid 
but transitory epoch of ripe perfection. Literature had arrived 
at that second stage of which Conington speaks,^ when thought 
finds language no longer as before intractable and inadequate, but 
able to keep pace with and even assist her movements. Trains 
of reflection are easily awakened ; a diction matured by reason 
and experience rivals the flexibility or sustains the weight of con- 
secutive thought. It is now that an author's mind exhibits itself 
in its most concrete form, and that the power of style is first fully 
felt. Eut language still occupies its proper place as a means and m t 
an end ; the artist does not pay it homage for its own sake ; this is 
reserved for the next period when the meridian is aheady past. 

^ E.g. rvrOhi^ 5' offcrov 6.iTct)Qev becomes ji?rocwZ tantu7n; xavra 8' evaWa 
yivoiTo becomes omnia vel onedmrn fiant mare, &c. 

2 Virgil as yet claims but a moderate degree of inspiration. 3Ie quoqua 
diomt Vatem pastores : sed non ego credidus illis. Nam ncque adhuc Vario 
videor nee dicere Cinna DiynUf sed argutos inter strepere anser olores. Ec. 
ix. 33. 

'^ Ec. v. 45. * In his preface to the Eclogues. 



THE GEOEGICS. 261 

It has already been said that the Georglcs were undertaken at 
the request of Maecenas.^ Prom more than one passage in the 
Eclogues we should infer that Yirgil was not altogether content 
with the light themes he was pursuing ; that he had before his 
mind's eye dim visions of a great work which should give full scope 
to the powers he felt within him. But Yirgil was deficient in 
self-reliance. He might have continued to trifle with bucolic 
poetry, had not Maecenas enlisted his muse in a practical object 
worthy of its greatness. This was the endeavour to rekindle the 
old love of husbandry which had been the nurse of Rome's virtue, 
and which was gradually dying out. To this object Yirgil lent 
himself with enthusiasm. To feel that his art might be turned to 
some real good, that it might advance the welfare of the state, 
this idea acted on him like an inspiration. He was by early 
training well versed in the details of country life. And he deter- 
mined that nothing which ardour or study could effect should be 
wanting to make his knowledge at once thorough and attractive. 
Eor seven years he wrought into their' present artistic perfection 
uhe technical details of husbandry ; a labour of love wrought out 
Df study and experience, and directed, as Merivale well says, to the 
glorification of labour itself as the true end of man. 

Yirgil's treatment is partially adapted from the Alexandrines ; 
but, as he himself says, his real model is Hesiod.^ The combina- 
tion of quaint sententiousness with deep enthusiasm, which he 
found in the old poet, met his conception of what a practical 
poem should be. And so, although the desultory maxims of the 
Works and Days give but a faint image of the comprehensive 
width and studied discursiveness of the Georgics^ yet they 
present a much more real parallel to it than the learned trifling of 
Aratus or JSTicander. For Yirgil, like Lucretius, is no trifier : he 
uses verse as a serious vehicle for impressing his conviction ; he 
acknowledges, so to say, the responsibility of his calling,^ and 
writes in poetry because poetry is the clothing of his mind. 
Hence the Georgics must be ranked as a link in the chain of 
serious treatises on agriculture, of which Cato's is the first and 
Yarro's the second, designed to win the nation back to the study 
and discipline of its youth. And that Columella so understood 
it is clear both from his defending his opinions by frequent quota- 

^ Page 248. Cf. also tua Maecenas haud mollia iussa, G. iii. 41. 

2 Ascraeumque cano Romana per oj^pida carmen, G. ii. 176. 

' The words lUe ludere quae vellem calamo permisit agresti (Eel. i. 10), 
might seem to contradict this, but the Eclogue were of a h'ghter cast. He 
never speaks of the Georg. or Aen. as lusus. So Hor. (Ep. i. 1, 10), versus 
et cetera ludicrapono ; ref erring to his odes. 



262 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

tion from it as a standard authority, and from his writing one 
book of his voluminous manual in verses imitated from Yirgil. 
The almost religious fervour with which Virgil threw himself into 
the task of arresting the decay of Italian life, which is the domi- 
nant motive of the Aeneid, is present also in the Georgics. The 
pithy condensation of useful experience characteristic of Cato, 

** Utiliumque sagax rerum et divina futuri 
Sortilegis non discrepuit sententia Delpbis,"^ 

the fond antiquarianism of Yarro, "laudator temporis acti," 
unite, with the newly-kiudled hope of future glories to he achieved 
under Caesar's rule, to make the Georgics the most complete 
embodiment of Roman industrial views, as the Aeneid is of 
Eoman theology and religion. 2 Virgil aims at combining 
the stream of poetical talent, which had come mostly from 
outside,^ with the succession of prose compositions on practical 
subjects which had proceeded from the burgesses themselves. 
Cato and Varro are as continually before his mind as Ennius, 
Catullus, and Lucretius. A new era had arrived : the systema- 
tising of the results of the past he felt was committed to him. 
Of Virgil's works the Georgics is unquestionably the most 
artis!:ic. Grasp of the subject, clearness of arrangement, evenness 
of style, are all at their high^.st excellence ; the incongruities that 
criticism detects in the Eclogues, and the unrealites that oiten 
mar the Aeneid^ are almost wholly absent. There is, however, 
one great artistic blemish, for which the poet's courage, not his 
taste, is to blame. We have already spoken of his affection for 
Gallus, celebrated in the most extravagant but yet the most 
ethereally beautiful of the Eclogues ;^ and this affection, unbroken 
by the disgrace and exile of its object, had received a yet more 
splendid tribute in the episode which closed the Georgics. 
Unhappily, the beauties of this episode, so honourable to the 
poet's constancy, are to us a theme for conjecture only; the 
narrow jealousy of Augustus would not suffer any honourable 
mention of one who had fallen under his displeasure ; and, to his 
lasting disgrace, he ordered Virgil to erase his work. The poet 
weakly consented, and filled up the gap by the story, beautiful, 
it is true, but singularly inappropriate, of Aristaeus and Orpheus 
and Eurydice. This epic sketch, Alexandrine in form but 

1 Hor. A. P. 218. 

* See Gr. i. 500, sqq. where Angustus is regarded as the saviour of the age. 
3 We have observed that except Lucretius all the great poets were from 

the municipia or provinces. 

* The tenth ; imitated in Milton's Lyddas. 



HIS LOYE OF NATUEE. 263 

abounding in touches of tlie ricliest native genius,^ must have 
revealed to Eome something of the loftiness of -which Virgil's 
muse was capable. With a felicity and exuberance scarcely inferior 
to Ovid, it united a power of awakening feeling, a dreamy pathos 
and a sustained eloquence, which marked its author as the heir of 
Homer's lyre, '■'■magnae spes altera Roinae."'^ 

In a work like this it would be obviously out of place to offer 
any minute criticism either upon the beauties or the difficulties of 
the Georgics. We shall conclude this short notice with one or two 
remarks on that love of nature in Latin poetry of which the 
Georgics are the most renowned example. Dunlop has called 
Virgil a landscape painter.^ In so far as this implies a faithful 
and picturesque delineation of natural scenes, whether of move- 
ment or repose,* the criticism is a happy one : Virgil lingers over 
these with more affection than any previous writer. The absence 
of a strong feeling for the peaceful or the grand in nature has 
often been remarked as a shortcoming of the Greek mind, and it 
does not seem to have been innate even in the Italian. Alpine 
scenery suggested no associations but those of horror and desolation. 
Even the more attractive beauties of woods, rills, and flowers, were 
hailed rather as a grateful exchange from the turmoil of the city 
than from a sense of their intrinsic loveliness ; it is the repose, 
the comfort, ease, in a word the body, not the t^pint of nature that 
the Eoman poets celebrate.^ As a rule their oavq retirement was 
not spent amid really rustic scenes. The villas of the great were 
furnished with every means of making study or contemplation 
attractive. Rich gardens, cool porticoes, and the shade of planted 
trees were more to the poet's taste than the rugged stile or the 
village green. Their aspirations after rural simplicity spring from 
the weariness of city unrealities rather than from the necessity of 
being alone with nature. As a fact the poems of Virgil were not 
composed in a secluded country retreat, but in the splendid and 
fashionable vicinity of iSTaples.^ The Lake of Avernus, the Sibyl's 

^ In its form it reminds us of those Epyllia which were such favourite 
subjects with Callimachus, of which the Peleus and Thetis is a specimen. 

^ Said to have been uttered by Cicero on hearing the Eclogues read ; the 
rima spes Romae being of course the orator himself. But the story, however 
pretty, cannot be true, as Cicero died before the Eclogues were composed. 

^ Hist. Lat. Lit. vol. iii. 

* The most powerful are perhaps the description of a storm (G. i. 316, sqq.\ 
of the cold winter of Scythia (G. iii. 339, sqq. ), and iu a slightly different 
way, of the old man of Corycia (G. iv. 125, sqq.). 

^ The latis otiafundis so much coveted by Romans. These remarks are 
scarcely true of Horace. 

* Naples, Baiae, Pozzuoli, Pompeii, were the Brightons and Scarhoroughs 
of Rome. Luxurious ease was attainable there, but the country was only 



264 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

cave, and tlie other scenes so beautifully painted in tlie AeneidaiQ 
all near the spot. From his luxurious villa the poet could indulge 
his reverie on the simple rusticity of his ancestors or the landscapes 
famous in the scenery of Greek song. At such times his mind 
called up images of Greek legend that blended with his delinea- 
tions of Italian peasant life :^ 

" ubi cam pi 
Spercheiosque, et virginibus bacchata Lacaenis 
Taygeta ; o qui ine gelidis in vallibus Haemi 
Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra ! " 

The very name Tempe, given so often to shady vales, shows the 
mingled literary and aesthetic associations that entered into the 
love of rural ease and quiet. The deeper emotion peculiar to 
modern times, which struggles to find expression in the verse of 
Shelley or Wordsworth, in the canvass of Turner, in the life of rest- 
less travel, often a riddle so perplexing to those who cannot under- 
stand its source ; the mysterious questionings which ask of nature 
not only what she says to us, but what she utters to herself ; why 
it is that if she be our mother, she veils her face from her children, 
and will not use a language they can understand — 

" Cur natum crudelis tu quoque falsis 
Ludis imaginibus ? Cur dextrae iungere dextram 
"Non datur, et veras audire et reddere voces ?" 

feelings like these which — though often but obscurely present, it 
would indeed be a superficial glance that did not read in much of 
modern thought, however unsatisfactory, in much of modern art, 
however imperfect — we can hardly trace, or, if at all, only as 
lighest ripples on the surface, scarely ruffling the serene melan- 
choly, deep indeed, but self-contained because unconscious of its 
depth, in which Virgil's poetry flows. 

At what time of his life Virgil turned his thoughts to epic 
poetry is not known. Probably like most gifted poets he felt from 
his earliest years the ambition to write a heroic poem. He ex- 
presses this feeling in the Eclogues'^ more than once; PoUio's 
exploits seemed to him worthy of such a celebration. ^ In the 

^given in a very artificial setting. It was almost like an artist painting land- 
scapes in his studio. 

■^ G. ii. 486. The literary reminiscences with which Yirgil associated the 
most common realities have often been noted. Cranes are for him Strymonian 
because Homer so describes them. Dogs are Amydean, because the Laco 
was a breed celebrated in Greek poetry. Italian warriors bend Cretan 
bows, &c. 

^ Ctim canerem reges etpraelia Cynthms aurem Vellit, et admonuit Pastorem 
Tityre, pingues Fascere oportet oves, deductum dicere carmen. (E. vi. 3). 

3 Jihi erit unquam Ille dies tua cum liceat miki diAxre facta (E. viii. 7.) ? 



HIS APTITUDE FOE EPIC POETRY. 265 

Georgics lie declares that he will wed Caesar's glories to an epic 
strain, 1 but though the emperor urged him to undertake the sub- 
ject, which was besides in strict accordance with epic precedent, 
his mature judgment led him to reject it.^ Like Milton, he seems 
to have revolved for many years the different themes that came 
to him, and, like him, to have at last chosen one which by mount- 
ing back into the distant past enabled him to indulge historical 
retrospect, and gather into one focus the entu^e subsequent develop- 
ment. As to his aptitude for epic poetry opinions differ. 
Hiebuhr expresses the view of many great critics when he says, 
" Virgil is a remarkable instance of a man mistaking his vocation ; 
his real calling was lyric poetry ; his small lyric poems show that 
he would have been a poet like Catullus if he had not been led 
away by his desire to write a great Graeco-Latin poem." And 
Mommsen, by speaking of "successes like that of the Aeiieid" 
evidently inclines towards the same view. It must be conceded 
that Virgil's genius lacked heroic fibre, invention, dramatic power. 
He had not an idea of "that stern joy that warriors feel," so 
necessary to one who would raise a martial strain. The passages 
we remember best are the very ones that are least heroic. The 
funeral games in honour of Anchises, the forlorn queen, the death 
of Nisus and Euryalus, owe all their charm to the sacrifice of the 
heroic to the sentimental. Had Virgil been able to keep rigidly 
to the lofty purpose with which he entered on his work, we should 
perhaps have lost the episodes which bring out his purest inspira- 
tion. So far as his original endowments went, his mind cer- 
tainly was not cast in a heroic mould. But the counter-balancing 
qualifications must not be forgotten. He had an inextinguishable 
enthusiasm for his art, a heart 

" Sniit with the love of ancient song," 

a susceptibility to literary excellence never equalled,^ and a spirit 
responsive to the faintest echo of the music of the ages.* The 

^ Mox tamcn ardentes accingar dicere pugnas Caesaris, &c. (G. ill. 46). The 
Caesar is of course Augustus. 

2 This eagerness to have their exploits celebrated, though common to all 
men, is, in its extreme development, [)eculiarly Roman. Witness the impor- 
tunity of Cicero to his friends, his epic on himself ; and the ill-concealed 
vanity of Augustus. "We know not to how many poets he applied to undertake 
a task which, after all, was never performed (except partially by Varius). 

^ Except perhaps by Plato, who, with Sophocles, is the Greek writer that 
most resembles Virgil. 

* Virgil, like Milton, possesses the power of calling out beautiful associa- 
tions from proper names. Tiie lists of sounding names in the seventh and 
tenth Aencivls are striking instances of this faculty. 



266 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE 

very faculties tliat bar liis entrance into the circle of creative minds 
enable liini to stand first among those epic poets who own a literary 
rather than an original inspiration. For in truth epic poetry is a 
name for two widely different classes of composition. The first 
comprehends those early legends and ballads which arise in a 
nation's vigorous youth, and embody the most cherished traditions 
of its gods and heroes and the long series of their wars and loves. 
Strictly native in its origin, such poetry is the spontaneous ex- 
pression of a people's political and religious life. It may exist in 
scattered fragments bound together only by unity of sentiment and 
poetic inspiration : or it may be welded into a whole by the genius 
of some heroic bard. But it can only arise in that early period of 
a nation's history when political combination is as yet imperfect, 
and scientific knowledge has not begun to mark off the domain of 
historic fact from the cloudland of fancy and legend. Of this class 
are the Homeric poems, the Nihelungen Lied, the N'orse ballads, 
the Edda, the Kalewdla, the legends of Arthur, and the poem of 
the Cid : all these, whatever their differences, have this in common, 
that they sprang at a remote period out of the earliest traditions 
of the several peoples, and neither did nor could have originated 
in a state of advanced civilization. It is far otherwise vs^ith the other 
sort of epics. These are composed amid the complex influences of a 
highly developed political life. They are the fruit of conscious 
thought reflecting on the story before it and seeking to unfold its 
results according to the systematic rules of art. The stage has 
been reached which discerns fact from fable ; the myths which to 
an earlier age seemed the highest embodiment of truth, are now 
mere graceful ornaments, or at most faint images of hidden realities. 
The state has asserted its dominion over man's activity ; science, 
sacred and profane, has given its stores to enrich his mind ; philo- 
sophy has led him to meditate on his place in the system of things. 
To write an enduring epic a poet must not merely recount heroic 
deeds, but must weave into the recital all the tangled threads which 
bind together the grave and varied interests of civilized man. 

It is the glory of Virgil that alone with Dante and Milton he 
has achieved this ; that he stands forth as the expression of an 
epoch, of a nation. That obedience to sovereign law,^ which is 
the chief burden of the Aeneid, stands out among the diverse 
elements of Eoman life as specially prominent, just as faith in the 
Church's doctrine is the burden of Medicevalism as expressed in 
Dante, and as justification of God's dealings, as given in Scripture, 
forms the lesson of Paradise Lost^ making it the best poetical 

^ It is true this law is represented as divine, not human ; but the principle 
is the same. 



HIS APTITUDE FOR EPIC POETPvY. 267 

representative of Protestant thought. IsTone of Virgil's predeces- 
sors understood the conditions under which epic greatness was 
possible. His successors, in spite of his example, understood them 
still less. It has been said that no events are of themselves un- 
suited for epic treatment, simply because they are modern or his- 
torical. ^ This may be true; and yet, where is the poet that has 
succeeded in them 1 The early Eoman poets were patriotic men ; 
they chose for subjects the annals of Eome, which they celebrated 
in noble though unskilled verse. Naevius, Ennius, Accius, Hos- 
tius, Bibaculus, and Varius before Virgil. Lucan and Silius after 
him, treated national subjects, some of great antiquity, some 
almost contemporaneous. But they failed, as Voltaire failed, 
because historical events are not by themselves the natural inb 
jects of heroic verse. Tasso chose a theme where history and 
romance were so blended as to admit of successful epic treatment ; 
but such conditions are rare. Few would hesitate to prefer the 
histories of Herodotus and Livy to any poetical account whatever 
of the Persian and Punic wars ; and in such preference they would 
be guided by a true principle, for the domain of history borders 
on and overlaps, but does not coincide with, that of poetry. 

The perception of this truth has led many epic poets to err in 
the opposite extreme. They have left the region of truth alto- 
gether, and confined themselves to pure fancy or legend. This 
error is less serious than the first ; for not only are legendary sub- 
jects well adapted for epic treatment, but they may be made the 
natiu-al vehicle of deep or noble thought. The Orlando Furioso 
and the Faery Queen are examples of this. But more often the 
poet either uses his subject as a means for exhibiting his learning 
or style, as Statins, Cinna, and the Alexandrines; or loses sight of the 
deeper meaning altogether, and merely reproduces the beauty of 
the ancient myths without reference to their ideal truth, as was 
done by Ovid, and recently by IMr Morris, with brilliant success, 
in his Earthly Paradise. This poem, like the Mdamoriilioses, 
does not claim to be a national epic, but both, by their vivid 
realization of a mythology which can never lose its charm, hold a 
legitimate place among the offshoots of epic song. 

Virgil has overcome the difhculties and joined the best results 
of both these imperfect forms. By adopting the legend of Aeneas, 
which, since the Punic ^\'ars, had established itself as one of the 
firmest national beliefs,^ he was enabled without sacrificing reality 
to employ the resources of Homeric art ; by tracing directly to 

^ Niebulir, Lecture, 106. 

2 For example, Saliust at the commencement of his Catiline regards it 
as authoritative. 



268 HISTOKY OF HOMAN LITEEATUKE. 

that legend the glorious development of Eoman life and Eoman 
dominion, he has become the poet of his nation's history, and 
through it, of the whole ancient world. 

The elements which enter into the plan of the Aeneid are so 
numerous as to have caused very different conceptions of its scope 
and meaning. Some have regarded it as tiie sequel and counter- 
part of the Iliad, in which Troy triumphs over her ancient foe, 
and Greece acknowledges the divine N'emesis. That this concep- 
tion was present to the poet is clear from many passages in which 
he reminds Greece that she is under Rome's dominion, and con- 
trasts the heroes or achievements of the two nations.^ But it is 
by no means sufficient to explain the whole poem, and indeed is 
in contradiction to its inner spirit. For in the eleventh Aeneid ^ 
Diomed declares that aft»r Troy was taken he desires to have no 
more war with the Trojan race ; and in harmony with this thought 
Yirgil conceives of the two nations under Rome's supremacy as 
working together by law, art, and science, to advance the human 
race.^ Roman talent has made her o^Yll all that Greek genius 
created, and fate has willed that neither race should be complete 
without the other. The germs of this fine thought are found in 
the historian Polybius, who dwelt on the grandeur of such a joint 
influence, and perhaps through his intercourse with the Scipionic 
circle, gave the idea currency. It is therefore rather the final 
reconciliation than the continued antagonism that the Aeneid cele- 
brates, though of course national pride dwells on the striking 
change of relations that time had brought. 

Another view of the Aeneid makes it centre in Augustus. 
Aeneas then "becomes a type of the emperor, whose calm calcu- 
lating courage was equalled by his piety to the gods, and care for 
public morals. Turnus represents Antony, whose turbulent 
vehemence (violentiaY mixed with generosity and real valour, 
makes us lament, while we accept his fate. Dido is the Egyptian 
queen whose arts fell harmless on Augustus's cold reserve, and 
whose resolve to die eluded his vigilance. Drances,^ the brilliant 
orator whose hand was slow to wield the sword, is a study from 
Cicero ; and so the other less important characters have historical 
prf)totypes. But there is even less to be said for this view than 
for the other. It is altogether k)o narrow, and cannot be made to 

1 Cf. Geor. ii. 140-176. Aen. 1. 283-5; vi. 847-853; also ii. 291, 2; 
432-4 ; vi, 837 ; xi. 281-292. 2 Xoc. cit. 

^ Observe the cave witli which he has recorded the history and origin of 
the Greek colonies in Italy. He seems to claim a right iu tlieni. 

" This word, as :Mr Nettleship has shown in his Introduction to the Study 
of Virgil, is used only of Turnus. 

^ 21. 336, sc[q. But the character bears no resemblance to Cicero's. 



SCOPE OF THE AENEID. 269 

correspond with the facts of history, nor do the characters on a 
close inspection resemble their supposed originals. ^ Beyond doubt 
the stirring scenes Virgil had as a young man witnessed, suggested 
pouits which he has embodied in the story, but the Greek maxim 
that " poetry deals with universal truth, "^ must have been rightly 
imderstood by him to exclude all such dressing-up of historical 
facts. 

There remains the view to which many critics have lent their 
support, that the Aeneid celebrates the triumph of law and civiliza- 
tion over the savage instincts of man ; and that because Eome 
had proved the most complete civilizing power, therefore it is to 
her greatness that everything in the poem conspires. This view 
has the merit of being in every way worthy of Yirgil. Xo loftier 
conception could guide his verse through the long labyrinth of 
legend, history, religious and antiquarian lore, in which for ten 
years of patient study his muse sought inspiration. Still it seems 
somewhat too philosophical to have been by itself his animating 
principle. It is true, patriotism had enlarged its basis ; the city 
of Rome Avas already the world,^ and the gro^vth of Rome was the 
growth of human progress. Hence the muse, while celebrating 
the imperial state, transcends in thought the limits of space and 
time, and swells, as it were, the great hymn of humanity. But 
this represents rather the utmost reach of the poet's flight after he 
has thrown himself into the empyrean than the original definitely 
conceived goal on which he fixed his mind. We should supple- 
ment this view by another held by Macrobius and many Latin 
critics, and of which Mr l^ettleship, in a recent admirable pam 
pliiet"^ recognises the jtistice, viz. that the Aeneid was written 
with a religious object, and must be regarded mainly as a religious 
poem. Its burning patriotism glows with a religious light. Its 
hero is " religious " (jnus), not " beautiful " or " brave." ^ At the 
sacrifice even of poetical effect his religious dependence on the 
gods is brought into prominence. The action of the whole poem 
hinges on the Divine will, which is not as in Homer, a mere 
counterpart of the human, far less is represented as in conflict 
with resistless destiny, but, cognizant of fate and in perfect union 

1 There are no doubt constant rapports between Augustus and Aeneas, 
between the unwillingness of Turnus to give up Lavinia, and that of Antony 
to give up Cleopatra, &c. But it is a childish criticism which founds a 
theory upon these. 

2 Tov KadoXov i(rriv, Arist. De Poet. ' " Urbis orbis.'* 
* Suggestions Introductory to the Study of the Aeneid. 

5 The Greek heroic epithets STos, KaXhs, ayaOos, &c. primarily significant 
of personal beauty, w^ere transferred to the moral sphere. The ei^thet pins 
is altogether moral and religious, and has no physical basis. 



270 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

witli it, as overruling all lower impulses, divine or human, 
towards the realization of the appointed end. This Divine Power 
is Jupiter, whom in the Aeneid he calls hy this name as a con- 
cession to conventional beliefs, but in the Georgics prefers to 
leave nameless, symbolised under the title Father. ^ Jupiter is 
not the Author, but he is the Interpreter and Champion of 
Destiny (Fata), which lies buried in the realm of the unknown, 
except so far as the father of the gods pleases to reveal it.^ 
Deities of sufficient power or resource may defer but cannot 
prevent its accomplishment. Juno is represented doing this — 
the idea is of course from Homer. But Jupiter does not desire 
to change destiny, even if he could, though he feels compassion 
at its decrees {e.g. at the death of Turnus). The power of the 
Divine fiat to overrule human equity is shown by the death of 
Turnus who has right, and of Dido who has the lesser wrong, on 
her side. Thus punishment is severed from desert, and loses its 
higher meaning; the instinct of justice is lost in the assertion 
of divine power; and while in details the religion of the Aeneid 
is often pure and noble, its ultimate conceptions of the relation of 
the human and divine are certainly no advance on those of Homer. 
The verdict of one v/ho reads the poem from this point of view 
will surely be that of Sellar, who denies that it enlightens the 
human conscience. Every form of the doctrine that might is 
right, however skilfully veiled, as it is in the Jj^eneid by a thou- 
sand beautiful intermediaries, must be classed among the crude 
and uncreative theories w^hich mark an only half-reflecting people. 
Eut when we pass from the philosophy of religion to the par- 
ticular manifestation of it as a national worship, we find Yirgil at 
his greatest, and worthy to hold the position he held with later 
ages as the most authoritative expounder of the Roman ritual and 
creed. ^ He shared the palm of learning with Yarro, and sym- 
pathy inclined towards the poet rather than the antiquarian. The 
Aeneid is literally filled with memorials of the old religion. The 
glory of Aeneas is to have brought Avith him the Trojan gods, and 
through perils of every kind to have guarded his faith in them, 
and scrupulously preserved their worship. It is not the Trojan 
race as such that the Eomans could look back to with pride as 

^ Pater ipse colendi ; hoMd facilcm esse viam voluit, and often. The name of 
Jupiter is in that poem reserved for the physical manifestations of the great 
Power. 

2 The questions suggested by Venus's speech to Jupiter (Aen. 1, 22^,sqq.) 
OS compared with that of Jupi;;er himself (Aen. x. 104), are too large to be 
discussed here. But the student is recommended to study them carefully. 

3 Like Dante, he was held to be Thvologits nullius dogmatis expcrs. See 
Boibsier, Religion des Eomahis, vol. i. ch.iii. p. 2G0. 



THE AENEID A RELIGIOUS POEM. 27i 

ancestors ; they are the his capti Pliryges, who are but heaven-sent 
mstruments for consecrating the Latin race to the mission for 
which it is prepared. ^^ Occidit,''^ says Juno, '''■ occideritque shids 
cum nomine Troja : " ^ and Aeneas states the object of his proposal 
in these words — 

" Sacra deosque dabo ; socer arma Latinas habeto."* 

This then being the lofty origin, the immemorial antiquity of the 
national faith, the moral is easily drawn, that Eome must never 
cease to observe it. The rites to import which into the favoured 
land cost heaven itself so fierce a struggle, which have raised that 
land to be the head of all the earth, must not be neglected now that 
their promise has been fulfilled. Each ceremony embodies some 
glorious reminiscence; each minute technicality enshrines some 
special national blessing. 

Here, as in the Georgics, Cato and Yarro live in Yii^gil, but 
with far less of narrow literalness, with far more of rich enthu- 
siasm. We can well believe that the Aeneid was a poem after 
Augustus's heart, that he welcomed mth pride as well as glad- 
ness the instalments which, before its publication, he was per- 
mitted to see,^ and encouraged by unreserved approbation so 
thorough an exponent of his cherished views.* To him the 
Aeneid breathed the spirit of the old cult. Its very style, h'ke 
that of Milton from the Bible, was borrowed in countless in- 
stances from the Sacred Manuals. When Aeneas ofi'ers to the 
gods four prime oxen (eximios tauros) the pious Eoman recognised 
the words of the ritual.* ^^^len the nymph Cymodoce rouses 
Aeneas to be on his guard against danger with the words " Vlgilas 
ne deum gens ? Aenea, vigila ! "^ she recalls the imposing ceremony 
by which, immediately before a war was begun, the general 
struck with his lance the sacred shields, calling on the god 
" AlarSf vigila I " These and a thousand other allusions caused 

1 Aen. xii. 882. 2 i\^ ^ii. 192. 

« See Macr. Sat. i. 24, 11. 

* Boissier, from whom this is talcen, adduces other instances. I quote an 
interesting note of his (Rel. Eoni. p. 261) : Ccpendant, quelqucs dlfficUes trou- 
vaient que Virgile setait quclqwfois tromjye. On lui rqn-ochait (V avoir fait 
iviDioler 2Mr Enee un taureau d Jupitei' quand il s'arrete daros la Thrace ct 
y fonde une villc, et scion Atcius Cainto ct Labeon, Ics lumieres du droit 2}on- 
iijical, cetait prcsqxCun sacrilege. Voild done, dit-wi, voire iioniifc qui 
ignore ce que savcnt meme Ics sacristans ! Mais on peut re2Jondrc que i^recise.' 
mcnt le sacrifice en question n'est 'pas accept'ahlc des di/;ux, et quHls forccnt 
hieatbt £nee 23ar de 2}resagcs rcdoubtablcs, a s' eloigner de ce 2Kii/s. Ainsi en 
sup2)osant que la science 2}ontificale d'jEnee soit en defauij la reputation de 
Virgile reste sans tac/ie." 

^ Aen. X. 288. 



272 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

many of the later commeiitators to regard Aeneas as an impersona- 
tion of tlie pontificate. This is an error analagous to, but worse 
than, that which makes him represent Augustus ; he is a poetical 
creation, imperfect no doubt, but still not to be tied to any 
single definition. 

Passing from the religious to the moral aspect of the Aeneid, 
we find a gentleness beaming through it, strangely contradicted by 
some of the bloody episodes, which out of deference to Homeric 
precedent Virgil interweaves. Such are the human sacrifices, the 
ferocious taunts at fallen enemies, and other instances of boasting 
or cruelty which will occur to every reader, greatly marrincr the 
artistic as well as the moral ejffect of the hero. Tame as he gene- 
rally is, a resigned instrument iji the divine hands, there are 
moments when Aeneas is truly attractive. As Conington says, 
his kmdly mterest in the young shown in Book V. is a beautiful 
trait that is all Virgil's own. His happy interview with Evander 
where, throwing off the monarch, he chats like a Eoman burgess 
m his country house; his pity for young Lausus whom he slays 
and the moui^nful tribute of affection he pays to PaUas, are touch- 
mg scenes, which without presenting Aeneas as a hero (which he 
never is), harmonise far better with the ideal Virgil meant to leave 
us. But after all said, that ideal is a poor one for purposes of 
poetry. Aeneas is uninteresting, and this is the great fault of the 
poem. Turnus enlists our sympathy far more, he is chivalrous 
and valiant; the wrong he suffers does not harden him, but he 
lacks strength of character. The only personage who is " proudly 
conceived "i is Mezentius, the despiser of the gods. The absence 
ol restramt seems to have given the poet a more masculine touch • 
the. address of the old king to his horse, his only friend, is fuU of 
patQos. Among female characters CamiUa is perhaps orioinal- 
^he is graceful without being pleasing. Amata and Juturna b'elon- 
to the_ class virago, a term applied to the latter by Virgil himself "2 
J^avmia is the modest maiden, a sketch, not a portrait. Dido is a 
cWcter for aU time, the chef d'oeuvre of the Aeneid. Anion- 
the stately ladies of the imperial house-a Livia, a Scribonia, aS 
Uctavia, perhaps a Julia— Virgil must have found the elements 
Jiiich he has fused with such mighty power,^ the rich beauty, the 
fierce passion, the fixed resolve. Dido is his greatest efi^ort : and 
yet she IS not an individual living Avoman like Helen or Ophelia. 

2 xi%T'''^ ^''^''^' " ^^^ expression is Chateaubriand's. 

3 The reader is referred to a book by M. de Burv '' Les femme^ tin, 
tn^ dAuguster^l^ere there are vivid ^sketches ^eo^i^l/^i:^ ^ 



RELATION OF THE AENEID TO PKECEDING POETRY. 273 

Like Eacine, Virgil has developed passions, not created persons. 
The divine gift of tender, almost Christian, feeling that is his, 
cannot see into those depths where the inner personality lies 
hidden. Among the traditional characters few call for remark. 
The gods maintain on the whole their Homeric attributes, only- 
hardened by time and by a Eoman moulding. Venus is, however, 
touched with magic skill; it may be questioned whether words 
ever carried such suggestions of surpassing beauty as those in 
which, twice in the poem., her mystic form^ is veiled rather than 
pourtrayed. The characters of Ulysses and Helen bear the 
debased, unheroic stamp of the later Greek drama ; the last spark 
of goodness has left them, and even his careful study of Homer 
seems to have had no eifect in opening the poet's eyes to the gross 
falsification. Where Virgil did not feel obliged to create, he was 
to the last degree conventional. 

A most interesting feature in the Aeneid — and with it we con- 
clude our sketch — is its incorporation of all that was best in pre- 
ceding poetry. All Eoman poets had imitated, but Virgil carried 
imitation to an extent hitherto unknown. Not only Greek but 
Latin writers are laid under contribution in every page. Some 
idea of his indebtedness to Homer may be formed from Coning- 
ton's commentary. Sophocles and the other tragedians, Apollonius 
Ehodius and the Alexandrines are continually imitated, and almost 
always improved upon. And still more is this the case with his 
adaptations from Naevius, Ennius, Lucretius, Hostius, Furius, 
&c. whose works he had thoroughly mastered, and stored in his 
memory their most striking rhythms or expressions. ^ Massive 
lines from Ennius, which as a rule he has spared to touch, leaving 
them in all their rugged grandeur planted in the garden of his verse, 
to point back like giant trees to the time when that garden was a 
forest, bear witness at once to his reverence for the old bard and 
to his own wondrous art. It is not merely for literary effect that 
the old poets are transferred into his pages. A nobler motive 
swayed him. The Aeneid was meant to be, above all things, a 
National Poem, carrying on the lines of thought, the style of 
speech, which National Progress had chosen; it was not meant to 
eclipse so much us to do honour to the early literature. Thus 
those bards who like Naevius and Ennius had done good service to 
Eorae by singing, however rudely, her histor}^, find their Imagines 
ranged in the gallery of the Aeneid. There they meet with the 
ilamens and pontiff's unltnown and unnamed, who drew up the 

1 Aen. i. 402 ; ii. 589. 

^ A list of passages imitated from Latin poets is given in Macrob. Sat. 
vL, which should be read. 

8 



274 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATUEE. 

ritual formularies, with the antiquarians and pious scholars who 
had sought to find a meaning in the immemorial names/ whethei 
of places or customs or persons; with the magistrates, moralists, 
and philosophers, who had striven to ennoble or enlighten Eoman 
virtue; with the Greek singers and sages, for they too had helped 
to rear the towering fabric of Eoman greatness. All these meet 
to<Tether in the Aeneid as if in solemn conclave, to review their 
joint work, to acknowledge its final completion, and predict its 
impending fall. This is beyond question the explanation of the 
wholesale appropriation of others' thought and language, which 
otherwise would be sheer plagiarism. With that tenacious sense 
of national continuity which had given the senate a policy for cen- 
turies, Yirgil regards Eoman literature as a gradually expanded 
whole; coming at the close of its first epoch, he sums up its results 
and enters into its labours. So far from hesitating whether to imi- 
tate, he rather hesitated whom not to include, if only by a single 
reference, in his mosaic of all that had entered into the history of 
Eome. His archaism is but another side of the same thing. 
Whether it takes the form of archselogical discussion, ^ of antiquarian 
allusion,^ of a mode of narration which recalls the ancient source,* 
or of obsolete expressions, forms of inflection, or poetical ornament,^ 
we feel that it is a sign of the poet's reverence for what was at 
once national and old. The structure of his verse, while full of 
music, often reminds us of the earlier writers. It certainly has 
more affinity with that of Lucretius than with that of Lucan. A 
learned Eoman reading the Aeneid would feel his mind stirred by 
a thousand patriotic associations. The quaint old laws, the maxims 
and religious formulae he had learnt in childhood would mingle 
with the richest poetry of Greece and Eome in a stream flowing 
evenly, and as it wou.ld seem, from a single spring; and he who 
by his art had effected this wondrous union would seem to him 
the prophet as well as the poet of the era. That art, in spite of 
its occasional lapses, for we must not forget the work was unfin- 
ished, is the most perfect the world has yet seen. The poet's 
exquisite sense of beauty, the sonorous language he wielded, the 

^ Such as Latium from latere, (Aen. viii. 322), and others, some of which 
may be from Varro or other philologians. 

2 A few instances are, the origin of Ara Maxima (viii, 270), the custom 
of veiled sacrifices (iii. 405), the Troia sacra (v, 600), &c. 

3 The pledging of Aeneas by Dido (i. 729), the god Portunus (v. 241). 

^ E.g. the allusion to the legendary origin of his narrative by the preface 
Dicitur, fertur (iv. 205 ; ix. 600). 

^ E-g.olli,limus,porgite,picLai,kc,.mentemaminumque,teque . . .tuocum 
Jlumine sancto; again, calido sanguine, geminas acies, and a thousand others, 
llis alliteration and assonance have been noticed in a former appendix. 



IMITATIONS OF VIEGIL. 



271 



noble rivalry of kindred spirits great enougli to stimulate but not 
to daunt Mm, and the consciousness of living in a new time big 
with triumphs, as he fondly hoped, for the useful and the good, 
all united to make Yirgil not only the fairest flowei of Eoman 
literature, but as the master of Dante, the beloved of all gentle 
hearts, and the most widely-read poet of any age, to render him 
an influential contributor to some of the deepest convictions of 
the modern world. 



APPENDIX. 
Note I. — Imitations of Virgil in Pro-pertius, Ovid, and Manilius. 



The prestige of Virgil made him a 
subject for imitation even during his 
lifetime. Just as Carlyle, Tennyson, 
and other vigorous writers soon create 
a school, so Yirgil stamped the 
poetical dialect for centuries. But 
he offered two elements for imitation, 
the declamatory or rhetoiicalj which 
is most prominent in his speeches, and 
in the second and sixth hooks; and 
detached passages showing descriptive 
imagery, touches of pathos, similes, 
&c. These last might be imitated 
without at all unduly influencing, the 
individuality of the imitator's style. 
In this Avay Ovid is a great imitator 
of Virgii; so to a less extent are Pro- 
pertius, Manilius, and Lucan. Sta- 
tins and Silius base their whole 
poetical art on him, and therefore 
particular instances of imitation 
throw no additional light on their 
(Style. We shall here notice a fe^v of 
the points in which the Augustan 
poets copied him : — 

(1) In Facts — Beside the great 
number of early historical points on 
which he was followed implicitly, we 
find even his errors imitated, e.g. the 
confusion which perhaps in Virgil is 
only apparent between Pharsalia and 
rhilip])!, has, as Merivale remarks, 
been adoptedby Propertius(iv. 10, 40), 
Ovid (M. XV, 824), Manilius (i. 906), 
Lucan (vii, 854), and Juvenal (viii. 
242) ; not so much from ignorance of 
the locality as out of deference to 
Virgilian precedent. The lines may 



be quoted— Virgil (G. i. 489), Ergo 
inter se paribus concAirrerc tclis Ro- 
manas acies itcrum videre Fhilip2n; 
Propertius, Una Philippeo sanguine 
inusta nota ; Ovid, Emathiaque itc- 
rum madefient caede PhilijJin ; Ma- 
nilius, Arraa Philippeos rin2)lerunt 
sanguine carapos. Vixquc etiam sicca 
miles Romanus arena Ossa virum 
lacerosque 2y^'ius superastitit artus ; 
Lucan, Scelerique seciindo Pracstatis 
nondum siccos hoc sanguine camp)os ; 
Juvenal, Thcssaliae cavijns Ociavius 
o.hstulit . . . famam . . . This is analo- 
gous to the way in which the satirists 
I use the names consecrated by Lu- 
cilius or Horace as types of a vice, 
and repeat the same symptoms ad 
nauseam, e g. the miser who anoints 
his body with train oil, who locks up 
his leavings, who picks up a farthing 
from the road, &c. The veiled allusion 
to the poet Anser (Eel. ix. 36) is 
perhaps recalled by Prop. iii. 32, 83, 
S(iq. So the portents described by 
Virgil as following on the death of 
Caesar are told again by Manilius at 
the end of Bk. I, and referred to by 
Lucan {Pilars, i.) and Ovid. Again, 
the confusion between Inarime and 
etV 'Api/xoLs, into which Virgil falls, is 
borrowed by Lucan {Phars. v. 101). 
(2) In Metre. — As regards metre, 
Ovid in the Metamorphoses is nearest 
to him, but differs in several points. 
Ke imit-ateshini — (a)innotadmitting 
words cf four or more syllables, except 
very rarely, at the end of the line; {h) 



276 



HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATUEE. 



ill rliythms like vulnificus sus (viii. 
358), and the not nnfrequent (t-kov^^io.- 
Covres ; (c) in keeping to the two cae- 
suras as finally established by him, 
md avoiding beginnings like scilicet 
omnibus \ est, &c. In all these points 
Manilius is a little less strict than 
Ovid, e.g. (i. 35) et veneranda, (iii. 
130) sic hreviantur, (ii. 716) attribu- 
untur. He also follows Virgil in 
alliteration, which Ovid does not. 
They differ from Virgil in — (a) a much 
more sparing employment of elision. 
The reason of this is that elision 
marks the period of living growth ; 
as soon as the language had become 
crystallised, each letter had its fixed 
force, the caprices of common pronun- 
ciation no longer influencing it; and 
although no correct writer places the 
unelided m before a vowel, yet the 
great rarity of elision not only of m 
but of long and even short vowels 
(except que) shows that the main 
object was to avoid it, if possible. 
The great frequency of elision in 
Virgil must be regarded as an archa- 
ism, {h) In a much lepser variety of 
rhythm. This is, perhaps, rather an 
arListic defect, but it is designed. 
Manilius, however, has verses which 
Virgil avoids, e.g. Belcctique sacer- 
dotes (i, 47), probably as a remini- 
scence of Lucretius. 

Imitations in language are very 
frequent. Propertius gives ahpereat I 
qui (i. 17, 13), from the Cojm. Again, 
Sit licet et saxo imiientiov ilia Sicano 
(i. 16, 29), fi-om the Cyclopia saxa of 
Acneid, i. 201 ; cum tamen (i. 1, 8) 
with the indie, as twice in Virgil ; 



Umbria me genuit (1. 23, 9), perhaps 
from the Mantua me genuit of Virgil's 
epitaph. These might easily be 
added to. Ovid in the Metamorphoses 
has a vast number of imitations of 
which we select the most striking ; 
Tlehs habitai diver sa locis (i. 193), 
Navigat, hie suvima, &c. (i. 296) ;cf. 
Naviget. haec summa est, in the 4th 
Aeneid; similisque roganti (iii. 240), 
amarunt me quoque Nymphae (iii., 
454) ; vale, vale inquit et Echo (iii. 
499) ; Arma manusque meae, mea, 
nate, potentia, dixit (v. 365) ; I£eu 
quantum haec JViobe Niobe distabat ah 
ilia (vi. 273) ; leti discrimine parvo 
(vi. 426) ; per nostri focdera Iccti, 
per que deos supplex oro super osque 
meosque. Per si quid mcrui de te heiM 
(vii. 852) ; maiorque videri (ix. 269), 
These striking resemblances, which 
are selected from hundreds of others, 
show how carefully he had studiedhim. 
Of all other poets I have noticed 
but two or three imitations in him, 
e.g. multi ilium pueri, multae cupi- 
ere puellae (iii. 383), from Catullus; 
et merito, quid enim . . . ? (ix. 585) 
from Propertius (i. 17). Manilius 
also imitates Virgil's language, e.g. 
acuit mortalia corda (i. 79), Acker- 
unta movcre (i. 93), molli cervice 
reflexus (i. 334), and his sentiments 
in omnia conando docilis solcrtia vicit 
(i. 95), compared with labor omnia 

\ vicit improbus : invictamque sub Hcc- 
tore Troiam (i. 766), with decumum 

I quos distulit Hector in annum of the 

I Aeneid ; cf. also iv. 122, and litora, 
litoribus rcgnis contraria rcgna (iv. 

I 814) ; cf. also iv. 28, 37. 



Note II. — On the shortening of final o in Latin poetry. 



The fact that in Latin the accent 
was generally thrown back caused 
a, stiong tendency to shorten long 
iiiial vowels. The one that resisted 
this tendency best was o, but this 
gradually became shortened as poetry 
ailvanced, and is one of the very few 
instances of a departure from the 
standard of quantity as determined 
by Ennius. There "^is one instance 



even in him : Horrida Romul&um 
certamina ^mwyo duellum. The 
words ego and 7nod6, which from their 
frequent use are often shortened in 
the comedians, are generally long in 
Ennius ; Lucretius uses them as 
common, but retains homo, which 
after him does not appear. Catullus 
has one short o, Virro (69, 1), but 
this is a proper name. Virgil has 



PARALLEL ISxM IN IIIS POETRY. 



277 



sciS (Aen. iii. 602), but ego, homo, 
wlien in the arsis, are always elided, 
e.g. Pulsus ego? aut; Grains homo, 
infectos. Spoiideo which used to be 
read {Aen. ix. 294), is now changed 
to sponde. Pollio is elided by Virgil, 
shortened by Horace (0. IL i. 14). 
He also has mentio and dixero in the 
Satires (L iv. 93, 104). A line by 
Maecenas, quoted in Suetonius, has 
diligo. Ovid has cito, puto [Am. iii, 
vii. 2), but only in such short words ; 
ill nouns, Naso often, origo, virgo, 
once each. Tibullus and Propertius 
are stricter in this respect, though 
Propertius hus fiyido (iii. oriv. 8 or 9, 
35) ; Manilius has lea, Virgo (i. 266), 
Lucan Virgd (ii. 329), pulmo (iii. 
644), and a few .others. Gratius iirst 



gives the imperative reponitS {Cyn. 
bQ); Calpurnius, in the the time of 
Nero, the false quantities quandS 
amb5, the latter (ix. 17) perhaps in 
a spurious eclogue ; so expccio. In 
Statins no new licenses appear. 
Juvenal, however, gives vtgilandG (iii. 
232), an improper quantity repeated 
by Seneca {Tro. 264) vinccndti, 
Neraesianus (viii. 53) mulcendo, (ix. 
80), laudandd. Juvenal gives also 
sumitd, odo, ei-gH. The dat. and 
abl. sing, are the only terminations 
that were not affected. We see the 
gradual deterioration of quantity, 
and are not surprised that even 
before the time of Claudian a strict 
knowledge of it was confined to the 
most learned poets. 



Note III. — On pai'allelism in VirgiVs poetry. 



There is a very frequent feature in 
Virgil's poetry which we may com- 
pare to the parallelism well known 
as the chief characteristic of Hebrew 
verse. In that language the poet 
takes a thought and either repeats it, 
or varies it, or explains it, or gives its 
antithesis in a corresponding clause, 
as evenly as may be balancing the 
first. As exam[)les we may take — 

(1) .\ mere iteration : 

•• Why do the nations so furiously rage to- 
gether? 
And why do the people imagine a vain 
thing?" 

(2) Contrast : 

'•A wise son maketh a glad father: 
But a foolish son is the heaviness of his 
mother." 

This somewhat rude idea of ornament 
is drawn no doubt from the simplest 
attempts to speak with passion or 
emphasis, which naturally turned to 
iteration or repietition as the ob/icJs 
means of gaining the effect. Roman 
poetry, as we have already said, rests 
upon a primitive and rude basis, the 
Greek methods of composition being 
applied to an art arrested before its 
growth was complete. The fondness 
lor repetition is very prominent. 
Phrases like somno gravidi vinoque 
sepulti; indu foro lato, sane toque 



senatu, occur commonly in Ennius ; 
and the trick of composition of which 
they are the simplest instances, is per- 
petuated throughout Roman poetry. 
It is in reality rather rhetorical than 
poetical, and abounds in Cicero. It 
scarcely occurs in Greek poetry, but 
is very common in Virgil, e.g. : 
" Ambo floventes aetatibus, Arcades ambo, 
Et cantare pares, et lespondere parati." 

Similar to this is the introduction of 
corresponding clauses by the same 
initial word, e.g. ille {Eel. i. 17) : 
"Namque erit ille mihi semper deus: illius 
aram 

Saepe tener nostris ab ovilibus imbuet aguus. 

Ille uieas eirare boves ..." 

Instances of this construction will 
occur to every reader. Frequently 
the first half of the hexameter ex- 
presses a thought obscurely which is 
expressed clearly in the latter half, 
or vice versa, e.g. (G. iv. 103) : 
" At quum incerta volant, caeloque examina 
ludunt." 

Again {Aen. iv. 368) : 

"Nam quid dissimulo, aut quae me ad maiora 

reseivo?" 
at times this parallelism is very 
useful as helping us to find out the 
poet's meaning, e.g. {Aen. ii. 121): 
"Cui fata parent, quern poscat Apollo." 
Here interpretations vary between 



278 



HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 



/ato, n. to parent, and ace. after it. 
But the parallelism decides at once 
in favour of the former "for whom 
the fates are making preparations ; 
whom Apollo demands." To take 
another instance {Aen. i. 395) : 

" Nunc terras ordine longo 
Aufc capere, aut captas, iam despectare 

videntur." 
This passage is explained by its 
parallelism with another a little 
further on (v. 400) : 

" Puppesque tuae plebesque tuorum 
Aut portum tenet aut pleno subit ostia velo." 

Here the word capere is fixed to mean 
"settling on the ground" by the 
words po7-tuvi tenet. Once more in 
Aen. xii. 725: 

*' Quern damnet labor, aut quo vergat pondere 
letum," 

the difficulty is solved both by the 
iteration in the line itself, by which 
damnet labor = vergat letum; and also 



by its close parallelism with another (v. 
71 7), which is meant to illustrate it: 

" Mussantque iuvencae 
Quis nemori impevitet quem tota armenta 
sequantur." 

This feature in Virgil's verse, which 
might be illustrated at far greater 
length, reappears under another form 
in the Ovidian elegiac. There the 
pentameter answers to the second 
half of Virgil's hexameter verse, and 
rings the changes on the line that 
has preceded in a very similar way, 
A literature which loves the balanced 
clauses of rhetoric will be sure to 
have something analogous. Our own 
heroic couplet is a case in point. So 
perhaps is the invention of rhyme 
which tends to confine the thought 
within the oscillating limits of a 
refrain, and that of the stanza, which 
shows the same process in a much 
higher stage of complexity. 



Note IV, — On the Legends connected vnth Virgil. 



Side by side with the historical 
account of this poet is a mythical 
one which, even within the early post- 
classical period,began to gain credence. 
The reasons of it are to be sought 
not so much in his poetical genius as 
in the almost ascetic parity of his 
life, which surrounded him with a halo 
of mysterious sanctit3^ Prodigies are 
said, in the lives that have come 
down to us, to have happened at his 
birth ; his mother dreamt she gave 
birth to a laurel-branch, which grew 
apace until it filled the country. A 
poplar planted at his birth suddenly 
grew into a stately tree. The infant 
never cried, and was noted for the 
preternatural sweetness of its temper. 
When at Naples he is said to have 
studied medicine, and cured Augus- 
tus's horses of a severe ailment. 
Augustus ordered him a daily allow- 
ance of bread, which was doubled on 
a second instance of his chirurgical 
knowledge, and trebled on his detect- 
ing the true ancestry of a rare Spanish 
hound! Credited with supernatural 
knowledge, though he never pre- 
tended to it, he was consulted pri- 



vately by Augustus as to his own 
legitimac3\ By the cautious dexterity 
of his answer, he so pleased the 
emperor that he at once recommended 
him to Pollio as a person to be well 
rewarded. The mixture of fable and 
history here is easily observed. The 
custom of making pilgrimages to his 
tomb, and in the case of Silius Itali- 
cus (and doubtless others too), of 
honouring it with sacrifices, seems 
to have produced the belief that he 
was a great magician. Even as early 
as Hadrian the Sortes Viy-gilianae 
were consulted from an idea that 
there was a sanctity about the pages 
of his bock ; and, as is well known, 
this superstitious custom was con- 
tinued until comparatively modern 
times. 

Meanwhile plays were represented 
from his works, and amid the general 
decay of all clear knowledge a con- 
fused idea sprung uj) that these stories 
weie inspired b}'^ supernatural wis- 
dom. The supposed connection of 
the fourth Eclogue with the Sibj;Uine 
Books, and through them, with the 
sacred wisdom of the Hebrews, of 



LEGENDS CONNECTED WITH VIRGIL. 



279 



course placea Virgil on a different 
level from other heathens. The old 
hymn, "Dies irae dies ilia Solvet 
saeclum cum favilla Teste David cum 
Sihylla," shows that as early as the 
eighth century the Sibyl was well 
established as one of the prophetic 
witnesses ; and the poet, from the 
indulgence of an obscure style, reaped 
the great reward of being regarded 
almost as a saint for several centuries 
of Christendom. Dante calls him 
Virtu summa, just as ages before 
Justinian had spoken of Hdnier as 
pater omnis virtutis. But before 
Dante's time the real Virgil had been 
completely lost in the ideal and 
mystic poet whose works were re- 
garded as wholly allegorical. 

The conception of Virgil as a magi- 
cian as distinct from an inspired sage 
is no doubt a popular one independent 
of literature, and had originally a 
local origin near Naples where his 
tomb was. Foreign visitors dissemi- 
oated the legend, adding striking 
features, which in time developed 
almost an entire literature. 

In the Otia ImiJcrialia of Gervasius 
of Tilbury, we see this belief in for- 
mation ; the main point in that work 
is that he is the protector of Naples, 
defending it by various contrivances 
from war or pestilence. He was 
familiarly spoken of among the Nea- 
politans as Parthcnias, in allusion to 
his cliastity. It was probably in the 
thirteenth century that the connec- 
tion of Virgil Avith the Sibyl was first 
systematically taught, and the legends 
connected with him collected into 
one focus. They will be found treated 
fully in Professor Comparetti's work. 



We append here a very short passage 
from the Gcsta Romanorum (p. 590), 
showing the necromantic character 
which surrouuded him : — 

" Refert Alexander Philosophus de 
natura rerura, quod Vergilius in civi- 
tate Eomana nobile construxit pala- 
tium, in cuius medio palatii stabat 
imago, quae Dea Eomana vocabatur. 
Tenebat enim pomum aureum in 
manu sua. Per circulum palatii 
erant imagines cuinslibet regionis, 
quae subiectae erant Romano imperio, 
et quaelibet imago campanam lig- 
neam in manu sua habebat. Cum 
vero aliqua regio nitebatur Roman is 
insidias aliquas iniponere, statim 
imago eiusdem regionis campanam 
suam pulsavit, et miles exivit in equo 
aeneo in summitate predicti palatii, 
hastam vibravit, et predictam re- 
gionem inspexit. Et ab instant! 
Roraani hoc videntes se armaverunt 
et predictam regionem expugna- 
verunt. 

"Istacivitas est Corpus Humanum : 
quinque portae sunt quinque Sensus: 
Palatium est Anima rationalis, et 
aureum pomum Similitudo cum Deo. 
Tria regna inimica sunt Caro, Mun- 
dus, Diabolus, et eius imago Cupi- 
ditas, Voluptas, Superbia." 

The above is a good instance both 
of the supernatural powers attributed 
to the poet, and the supernatural 
interpretation put upon his supposed 
exercise of them. This curious 
mythology lasted throughout the 
fourteenth century, was vehemently 
opposed in the fifteenth by the par- 
tisans of enlightened learning, and 
had not quite died out by the middle 
ot the sixteenth. 



CHAPTEE III. 



Horace (65-8 b.c.). 

If Yirgil is the most representative, Horace is the most original 
poet of Eome. This great and varied genius, whose exquisite 
taste and deep knowledge of the world have made him the chosen 
companion of many a great soldier and statesman, suggesting as 
he does reflections neither too ideal nor too exclusively literary 
for men of affairs, was born at or near Venusia, on the borders of 
Lucania and Apulia, December 8, 65 b.c.^ His father was a 
freedman of the Horatia gens,^ but set free before the poet's 
birth. ^ We infer that he was a tax-gatherer, or perhaps a collector 
of payments at auctions ; for the word coactor,'^ which Horace uses, 
is of wide apphcation. At any rate his means sufficed to purchase 
a small farm, where the poet passed his childhood. Horace was 
able to look back to this time with fond and even proud remini- 
scences, for he relates how prodigies marked him even in infancy 
as a special favourite of the gods.^ At the age of twelve he was 
brought by his father to Eome and placed under the care of the 
celebrated Orbihus Pupillus.^ The poet's filial feeling has left us 
a beautiful testimony to his father's afiectionate interest in his 
studies. The good man, proud of his son's talent, but fearing the 
corruptions of the city, accompanied him every day to school, and 
consigned him in person to his preceptor's charge,^ a duty usually 
left to slaves called paedagogi, who appear to have borne no high 
character for honesty,^ and at best did nothing to improve those 
of whom they had the care. From the shrewd counsels of his 
father, who taught by instances not by maxims,^ and by his own 
strict example, Horace imbibed that habit of keen observation and 

' In tlie consulship of L, Anreliiis Cotta and L. Manlius Torquatus. ** 
nate mecum consule Manlio," Od. III. xxi. 1 ; Epod xiii. 6. 
2 Libertino loatre natum, Sat. I. vi. 46. 

'* Natus duvi ingenuus, ib. v. 8. * Sat. I. vi. 86. 

^ Mefahulosae Vulture in Avulo, &c. ; Od. iii. 4, 9. 
6 Ep. II. i. 71. 7 s, I. yi 8. 8 J^y^ y-^i 218. » Sat. I. iv. 113 



LIFE OF HOEACE. 281 

that genial view of life wMch distinguish him above all other 
satirists. He also learnt the caution which enabled him to steer 
his course among rocks and shoals that would have wrecked a 
novice, and to assert his independence of action with success even 
against the emperor himself. 

The life of Plorace is so well known that it is needless to retrace 
it here. We shall do no more than summarise the few leading 
events in it, alluding more particularly to those only which affect 
his literary position. After completing his education so far in the 
capital, he went for a time, as was customary, to study philosophy 
at Athens. 1 While he was there the death of Caesar and the 
events which followed roused the fierce party spirit that had 
uneasily slumbered.' Horace, then twenty-two years of age, was 
offered a command by Brutus on his way to Macedonia, which he 
accepted, 2 and apparently must have seen some hard service.^ He 
shared the defeat of the Eepublicans at Philippi,* and as the 
territory of Yenusium, hke that of Cremona, was selected to be 
parcelled out among the soldiery, Horace was deprived of his 
paternal estate,^ a fact from which we learn incidentally that his 
father was now dead. 

Thrown upon his own resources, he sought and obtained per- 
mission to come to Rome, where he obtained some small post as a 
notary^ attached to the quaestors. Poverty drove him to verse- 
making,^ but of what kind we do not certainly know. Probably 
epodes and satires were the first fruits of his pen, though some 
scholars ascribe certain of the Odes {e.g. i. 14) to this period. 
About this time he made the acquaintance of Virgil, which ripened 
at least on Horace's part into warm affection. Virgil and Varius 
introduced him to Maecenas,^ who received the bashful poet with 
distant hauteur, and did not again send for him until nine months 
had elapsed. Slow to make up his mind, but prompt to act when 
his decision was once taken, Maecenas then called for Horace, 
and in the poet's words, bade him be reckoned among his friends;^ 

* Ep. IT. ii. 43. 

^ Quae mihi imreret lejio Romnna trihuno, Sat, I. vL 48. 

* saepe tnccum teiapus imiUimum deducte, Od. 11. vii. 1. 

* lb. 5. 5 Ep, II, ii, 51^ 

" Sueton. Vit. Hor. ; cf. Sat. II. vi. 37, De re cojnmuni scrihae te ora- 
hant . . . rcverti. 

7 Ep. ii. 2, 51. 8 s, I, vi. 55. 

^ lubcsque esse in amicorum numrro. — lb. This expression is important, 
since many scholars have found a difficulty in Horace's accompanying Msie- 
cenas so soon after his accession to his circle, and have supposed that Sat. I. v. 
refers to another expedition to Brundisium, undertaken two years later. 
This is precluded, however, by the mention of Cocceius Nerva. 



282 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

and very shortly afterwards we find tliem travelling together U 
Brundisiuim on a footing of familiar intimacy (39 B.C.). This cir- 
cumspection of Maecenas was onlj natural, for Horace was of a 
very different stamp from Varius and Yirgil, who were warm 
admirers of Octavius. Horace, though at first a Platonist,^ 
then an Epicurean, ^ then an Eclectic, was always somewhat of a 
"free lance. ''^ His mind was of that independent mould which 
can never be got to accept on anybody's authority the solution of 
problems which interest it. Even when reason convinced him 
that imperialism, if not good in itself, was the least of all possible 
evils, he did not become a hearty partisan; he maintained from 
first to last a more or less critical attitude. Thus Maecenas may 
have heard of his literary promise, of his high character, without 
much concern. It was the paramount importance of enlisting so 
able a man on his own side that weighed with the shrewd states- 
man, Eor Horace, with the recklessness that poverty inspires, 
had shown a disposition to attack those in power. It is generally 
thought that Maecenas himself is ridiculed under the name 
Malthinus.* It is nevertheless clear that when he knew Maecenas 
he not only formed a high opinion of his character and talent, but 
felt a deep affection for him, which expresses itself in the generous 
language of an equal friend, with great respect, indeed, but totally 
without unworthy complaisance. The minister of monarchy 
might without inconsistency gain his goodwill; with the monarch 
it was a different matter. For many years Horace held aloof from 
Augustus. He made no application to him ; he addressed to him 
no panegyric. Until the year 29, when the Temple of Janus was 
closed, he showed no approval of his measures. AU his laudatory 
odes were written after that event. He indeed permitted the 
emperor to make advances to him, to invite him to his table, and 
maintain a friendly correspondence. But he refused the office of 
secretary which Augustus pressed upon him. He scrupulously 
abstained from pressing his claims of intimacy, as the emperor 
wished him to do; and at last he drew forth from him the 
remorseful expostulation, " Why is .it that you avoid addressing 
me of all men in your poems ? Is it that you are afraid posterity 
will think the worse of you for having been a friend of mine ^"^ 

1 S. ii. 3. 11. 2 Ep. I. vi. 16. 

^ Nulliiis addidibs iurare in verba magistri, Ep. I. i. 14. 

4 S. L ii. 25. 

^ Suet. A'^it. Hor. Fragments of four letters are preserved. One to Mae- 
cenas, ^' Ante ijjse sv,fficiebam seribeiidis ejnstolis arniccn-icm; nunc occnpatis- 
simus et infirmiis, Horatium nostrum te cupio adducerc. Veniet igiur ah 
isfa parasitica mensa ad lianc rcgiam, et nos in epistolis scribendis adiuvabit. " 
Observe the future tense, the confidence that his wish will not be disputed. 



o: 



LIFE OF HOEACE. 283 

This appeal elicited from the poet that excellent epistle which 
traces the history and criticises the merits of Latin poetry. From 
all this we may be sure that when Augustus's measures are cele- 
brated, as they are in the third book of the Odes and other places, 
with emphatic commendation, though the language may be that of 
poetical exaggeration, the sentiment is in the main sincere. It is 
a greater honour to the prudent ruler to have won the tardy 
approval of Horace, than to have enlisted from the outset the 
enthusiastic devotion of Yirgil. 

"We left Horace installed as one of IMaeccnas's circle. This 
position naturally gained him many enemies; nor was his char- 
acter one to conciliate his less fortunate rivals. He was choleric 
and sensitive, prompt to resent an insult, though quite free from 
malice or vindictiveness. He had not yet reached that high sense 
of his position when he could afford to treat the envious crowd 
with contempt.^ He records in the satires which he now wrote, 
painting with inimitable humour each incident that arose, the 
attempts of the outsiders to obtain from him an introduction to 
Maecenas,- or some of that political information of which he was 
supposed to be the confidant.^ At this period of his career he 
lived a good deal with his patron both in Eome and at his Tibur- 
tine villa. Within a few years, however (probably 31 B.C.), he 
was put in possession of what he had always desired,^ a small 
competence of his ovrn. This was the Sabine estate in the valley 
of Ustica, not far from Tivoli, given him by Maecenas, the subject 
of many beautiful allusions, and the cause of his warmest gTatitude.^ 
Here he resided during some part of each year^ in the enjoyment 
f that independence which was to him the greatest good; and 
uring the seven years that followed he wrote, and at their close 
ublished, the first three books of the Odes.^ The death of Yirgil, 



He received to his surprise the poet's refusal, lint to his credit did not take 
it amiss. He wrote to him, " S'uvie tihi aliquid iuris ajpucl me, tanquam si 
convictor mihi fuei'is; quoniam id usus mi/ii tecum esse volui, sifter valctudi- 
neni tuam fieri fotuisset.'" And somewhat later, ^^ Tui qualcm liabemn 
mcmoi'ia'in potcris ex Septvmio quoque nostro audire; nam incidU, ut illo coram 
fierct a me tui 7nentio. Neque enivi si tu sv/perhus amieitiam nostravi sprrvisti, 
ideo nos quoque ayOvirepcppovovixiv. The fourth fragment is the one translated 
in the text. 

^ Qucm rodunt omnes . . . quia sum tihi, Maecenas, convictor, S. I. 
vi. 46. Contrast his tone, Ep. I. xix. 19, 20; Od. iv. 3. 

2 Sat. I. ix. 3 Sat, 1 1, vi. 30, sqq. 

* S. H. vi. 1. s 0. n. xviii. 14 ; IH. xvi. 28; sqq. 

^ The year in which lie received the Sabine farm is disputed. Some (e.g. 
Grotefend) date it as far hack as 33 B.C.; others, with more probability, 
about 31 B.C. 

^ They were probably published simultaneously in 23 B.C. If we take 



284 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

which happened when Horace was forty-six years of age, and soon 
afterwards that of Tibullus, threw his affections once more upon 
his early patrons. He now resided more frequently at Eome, and 
was often to be seen at the palace. How he filled the arduous 
position of a courtier may be gathered from many of the Epistles 
of the first book. The one which introduces Septimus to Tiberius 
is a masterpiece;^ and those to Scaeva and Lollius^ are models of 
high-bred courtesy. E'o one ever mingled compliment and advice 
with such consummate skill. Horace had made his position at 
court for himself, and though he still loved the country best,^ he 
found both interest and profit in his daily intercourse with the 
great. 

In the year 17 B.C. Augustus found an opportunity of testifying 
his regard for Horace. The secular games, which were celebrated 
in that year, included the singing of a hymn to Apollo an d Diana 
by a chorus of 27 boys and the same number of girls, selected from 
the highest families in the state. The composition of this hymn 
was intrusted to Horace, much to his own legitimate pride, and to 
our instruction and pleasure, for not only is it a poem of high 
intrinsic excellence, but it is the only considerable extant speci- 
men of the lyrical part of Roman worship. Some scholars include 
tinder it besides the Carmen Saeculare proper, various other odes, 
some of which unquestionably bear on the same subject, though 
there is no direct evidence of their having been sung together.* 
Whether Horace had any Eoman models in this style before him 
is not very clear. We have seen that Livius Andronicus was 
selected to celebrate the victory of Sena ;^ and there is an ode of 
Catullus^ which seems to refer to some similar occasion. Doubt- 
less the main lines in which the composition moved were indicated 
by custom ; but the treatment was left to the individual genius of 
the poet. In this case we observe the poet's happy choice of a 
metre. Of aU the varied lyric rhythms none, at least to our ears, 
lends itself so readily to a musical setting as the Sapphic ; and 
the many melodies attached to odes in this metre by the monks of 
the Middle Ages attest its special adaptability to choh'-singing. 
Augustus was highly pleased with the poet's performance, and two 
years' afterwards he commanded him to celebrate the victory of 

the earlier date for his possession of the Sabine farm, he will have been nearly 
ten years preparing them. 
1 Ep. I. ix. 2 ]Ep j^ xvii. and xviii. ^ Ep_ j xiv. 

* The first seven stanzas of IV. 6, with the prehide (III. i. 1-4), are sup- 
posed to have been sung on the first day; I. 21 on the second; and on the 
third the C.S. followed by IV. vi. 28-44. 

* See p. 38. « C. xxxii 



I 



I 



LIFE OF HORACE. 285 

his step-sons Dmsns and Tiberius over the Ehaeti and Yindelici.^ 
This circumstance turned his attention once more to lyric poetry, 
which for six years he had quite discontinued. ^ It is not conclu- 
sively proved that he wrote all the odes which compose the fourth 
book at this period ; two or three bear the impress of an earlier 
date, and were doubtless improved by re-writing or revision, but 
the majority were the production of his later years, and present to 
us the fruits of his matured judgment and taste. They show no 
diminution of lyric power, but the reverse ; nor is there any ode 
in the first three books which surpasses or even equals the fourth 
poem in this collection. Horace's attention was, during the last 
few years of his life, given chiefly to literary subjects ; the treatise 
on poetry and the epistle to Julius Florus were written probably 
between 14 and 11 B.C. That to Augustus is the last composition 
that issued from his pen; we may refer it to 10 b.c. two years 
before his death. 

Horace's health had long been the reverse of strong. "Whether 
from early delicacy, or from exposure to hardships in Asia, his con- 
stitution was never able to respond to the demands made upon it by 
the society of the capitaL The weariness he expresses was often 
the result of physical prostration. The sketch he has left of him- 
self ^ suggests a physique neither interesting nor vigorous. He 
was at 44 short, fat, and good-natured looking (ralhed, we learn, 
by Augustus on his obesity), blear-eyed, somewhat dyspeptic, and 
prematurely grey ; and ten years, we may be sure, had not im- 
proved the portrait. In the autumn of 8 B.C. Maecenas, who had 
long been himself a sufferer, succumbed to the effects of his devoted 
and arduous service. His last message confided Horace to the 
Emperor's care : " Horatii Flacci ut mei esto memor." But the 
legacy was not long a burden. The prophetic anticipations of affec- 
tion that in death the poet would not be parted from his friend* 
were only too faithfully realised. Within a month of ]\Iaecenas's 
death Horace was borne to his rest, and his ashes were laid beside 
those of his patron on the Esqiiilinc (November 29, 8 B.C.). 

As regards the date of publication of his several books, several 
theories have been propounded, for which the student is referred 
to the many excellent editions of Horace that discuss the question. 
We shall content ourselves with assigning those dates which seem 
to us the most probable. All agree in considering the first book 
of the Satires to have been his earliest effort This may have been 
published in 34 B.C. ; and in 29 b.c. the two books of Satires 
together, and perhaps the Ejpodes. In 24 b.c. probably appeared 

1 Od. IV. 4. 2 Ep. I. i. 10. 

» Ep. I. XX. ^ Od. II. xvii. 5. 



286 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

the first two books of Odes, wliicli open and close with a dedica- 
tion to Maecenas, and in 23 B.C. the three books of Odes complete; 
though some suppose that all appeared at once and for the first 
timi in this later year. In 21 B.C. perhaps, but more probably in 
20, the first book of the Epistles was published; in 14 B.C. the 
fourth book of the Odes, though it is possible that the last ode of 
that book was ^vritten at a later date. The second book of 
Epistles, in which may have been included the Ars Poetica, could 
not have appeared before 10 B.C. It is clear that the latter poem 
is not complete, but whether Horace intended to finish it more 
thoroughly it is impossible to say. 

In approaching the criticism of Horace, the first thing which 
strikes us is, that in him we see two different poets. There is the 
lyricist winning reno^vii by the importation of a new kind of 
Greek song; and there is the observant critic and man of the 
world, entrusting to the tablets, his faithful companions, his re- 
flections on men and things. The former poet ran his course 
through the Epodes to the graceful pieces which form the great 
majority of his odes, and culminated in the loftier vein of lyric 
inspiration that characterises his political odes. The latter began 
with a somewhat acrimonious type of satire, which he speedily 
deserted for a lighter and more genial vein, and finally rested in 
the sober, practical, and healthy moralist and hterary critic of the 
Epistles. It was in the former aspect that he assumed the title of 
poet ; with characteristic modesty he relinquishes all claim to it 
with regard to his Epistles and Satires. We shall consider him 
briefly under these two aspects. 

Is"© writer believed so little in the sufficiency of the poetic gift 
by itself to produce a poet. Had he trusted the maxim Poetn 
na.'icitur, non fit, he would never have Avritten his Odes. Looking 
back at his early attempts at verse we find in them few traces of 
genuine inspiration. Of the Epodes a large number are positively 
unpleasing ; others interest us from the expression of true feeling ; 
a few only have merits of a high order. The fresh and enthusiastic, 
though somewhat diffuse, descriptions of country enjoyments in 
the second and sixteenth Epodes, and the vigorous word-painting in 
the fifth, bespeak the future master; and the patriotic emotion in the 
seventh, ninth, and sixteenth, strikes a note that was to thrill with 
loftier vibrations in the Odes of the third and fourth books. But as a 
whole the ^9or?^s -stand far below his other works. Their bitter- 
ness is quite different from the genial irony of the Satires, and, 
though occasionally the subjects of them merited the severest hand- 
ling,! jQ^ ^yg ^Q j^qI- j-|,g |.Q ggg Horace applying the lash. It was 

^ E.g. tlie infamous Sextus Menas wlio is attacked in Ep. 4 



HO CAGE AS A LYRIC POET. 287 

not his proper vocation, and lie does not do it well. He is never 
so unlike himself as Avhen he is making a personal attack. IS'ever- 
theless to bring himself into notice, it was necessary to do some- 
thing of the kind. Personal satire is always popular, and Horace 
had to carve his ovm way to fame. It is evident that the series 
of sketches of which Canidia is the heroine, ^ were received with 
unanimous approval by the heau monde. This \ATetched woman, 
singled out as the representative of a class which was gaining daily 
influence in Eome,^ he depicts in colours detestable and ignominious, 
which do credit to his talent but not to his courteous feeling. 
Horace has no true respect for woman. JSTothing in all Latiii 
poetry is so unpleasant as his brutal attacks on those lietaerae (the 
only ladies of whom he seems to have had any knowledge) whose 
caprice or neglect had offended him.^ This is the one point in which 
he did not improve. In all other respects his constant self-culture 
opened to him higher and ever widening paths of excellence. 

The glimpses of real feeling which the Epodes allow us to gain 
are as a rule carefully excluded from the Odes. This is at first 
sight a matter for surprise. Our idea of a lyric poem is that of a 
warm and passionate outpouring of the heart. Such are those of 
Burns ; such are those of nearly all the ^Titers who have gained 
the heart of modern times. In the grand style of dithyrambic 
song, indeed, the bard is rapt into an ideal world, and soars far 
beyond his subjective emotions or desires ; but to this Pindaric 
inspiration Horace made no pretension. He was content to be an 
imitator of Alcaeus and Sappho, who had attuned to the lyre their 
own hopes and fears, the joys and sorrows of their own chequered 
Hfe. But in imitating their form he has altogether changed their 
spirit. AAn:iere they indulged feeling, he has controlled it ; what 
they effect by intensity of colour, he attains by studied propriety 
of language. He desires not to enlist the world to sympathy with 
himself, but to put himself in sympathy with the world. Hence 
the many-sidedness, the culture, the broad human stand-point after 
which he ceaselessly strives. If depth must be sacrificed to attain 
this, he is ready to sacrifice it. He finds a field wide enough in 
the network of aims, interest, and feelings, which give society it? 
hold on us, and us our union with society. And he feels that the 
writer who shall make his poem speak with a living A^oice to the 
largest number of these, wiU meet with most earnest heed, and be 

1 Epod. 5 and 17, and Sat. I. viii. 

" Epod. viii. xii. ; Od. iv. xiii, 

' The sorceresses or fortune-tellers. Some have without any authority 
supp' sed her to have been a mistress of the poet's, whose real name was 
Gratidia, and with whom he qTiarrelled. 



288 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

doing best the poet's true work. At the same time we must not 
forget that Horace's public was not our public. The unwieldy 
mass of labouring millions, shaken to its depths by questionings 
of momentous interest, cannot be dra^wn to listen except by an 
emotion vast as its own ; but the society for whom Horace wrote 
was homogeneous in tone, limited in number, cultivated in intel- 
lect, and deeply absorbed in a race of ambition, some of whose prizes, 
at least, each might hope to win. He was, has been, and intended 
MmseK to be, the poet of men of the world. 

Among such men at all times, and to an immeasurably greater 
extent in antiquity than now, staunch friendship has been con- 
sidered one of the chief of virtues. Whatever were Horace's 
relations to the other sex, no man whom he had once called a friend 
had any cause to complain. Admirable indeed in their frankness, 
their constancy, their sterling independence, are the friendships it 
has dehghted him to record. From the devoted, almost passionate 
tribute to Maecenas — 

** Ibimus ibimus 
Utcunque praecedes supreiiium 
Carpere iter coraites parati," 

to the raillery so gracefully flung at an Iccius or Xanthias, for 
whom yet one discerns the kindest and tenderest feeling, these 
memorials of Eoman intercourse place both giver and receiver in 
a truly amiable light. We can understand Augustus's regret that 
he had not been honoured with a regard of which he well knew 
the value. For the poet was rich who could dispense gifts like 
these. 

Interspersed with the love-odes, addresses to friends and inhces 
de circonstance, we observe, even in the earlier books, lyrics of a 
more serious cast. Some are moral and contemplative, as the 
grand ode to Fortune ^ and that beginning 

"Non ebur neque auveum 
Mea renidet in domo lacunar. "^ 

Others are patriotic or political, as the second, twelfth, and thirty- 
seventh of Book I. (the last celebrating the downfall of Cleopatra), 
and the fifteenth of Book 11. which bewails the increase of luxury. 
In these Horace is rising to the truly Eoman conception that 
poetry, like other forces, should be consecrated to the service of 
the state. And now that he could see the inevitable tendency of 
things, could gauge the emperor's policy and find it really advan- 
tageous, he arose, no longer as a half-unwilling witness, but as a 
zealous co-operator to second political by moral power. The first 

^ T. XXXV - II. xvii. 



THE PATRIOTIC ODES. 289 

six and the twenty-fourth. Odes of the third book show ns Horace 
not indeed at his best as a poet, but at his highest as a writer. 
They exhibit a more sustained manhness of tone than is perhaps 
to be found in any passages of equal length from any other author. 
Heathen ethics have no nobler portrait than that of the just man 
tenacious of his purpose, with which the third ode begins ; and 
Roman patriotism no grander witness than the heart-stirring nar- 
rative of Eegulus going forth to Carthage to meet his doom. 
"Whether or not the third ode was \mtten to dissuade Augustus 
from his rumoured project of transferring the seat of empire from 
Eome to Trey, it expresses most strongly the firm conviction of 
those best worth consulting, and, if the emperor really was in 
doubt, must, in conjunction with "Virgil's emphatic repetition of 
the same sentiment, i have effectually turned him from his purpose. 
For these odes carried great authority. In them the poet appears 
as the authorised voice of the state, dispensing verba et mces^ " the 
charm of poesy " to allay the moral pestilence that is devouring 
the people. 

In one can read the odes without being struck with certain 
features wherein they differ from his other works. One of these 
is his constant employment of the Olympian mythology. What- 
ever view we may hold as to their appearance in the Aeneid^ there 
can be no doubt that in the Odes these deities have a purely 
fictitious character. With the single exception of Jupiter, the 
eternal Father, without second or equal even among the Olympian 
choir, 3 whom he is careful not to name, none of his allusions imply, 
but on the contrary implicitly disown, any behef in their existence. 
In the satires and epistles he never employs this conventional 
ornament. The same thing is true of his language to Augustus. 
Assuming the poet's license, he depicts him as the son of Maia,* 
the scion of kindly deities,^ and a living denizen of the ethereal 
mansions. *5 But in the epistles he throws off this adulatory tone, 
and accosts the Caesar in a way befitting their mutual relations ; 
for in declaring that altars are raised to him and men swear by his 
name,'^ he is not usmg flattery, but stating a fact. Another poiut 
of difference is his fondness in the Odes for commonplaces, e.g. the 



^ Cf. Troiae renascens alite luguhri . . . with Occidit occicUritquc sinas cum. 
nomine Iroia. In both cases Juno is supposed to utter the sentiment. This 
can hardly be mere accident. 

'^ Ep. I. 1. 33, Fervet avm-itia miseroque cupidine x><^ctus; Sunt verba et 
voces quibus hunc lenire dolorevii I'ossis. 

» Od. I. xii. 17. * Od. I. ii. 43. 

^ Od. IV. V. 1. 6 Od. III. iii. 9. 

' Ep. II. i. 15. 

T 



290 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITER A.TURE. 

degeneracy of the age,^ tlie necessity of enjoying the inoment,^ 
which he enforces with every variety of ilkistration. Neither of 
these was the result of genuine conviction. On the former he 
gives us his real view (a very noble and rational one) in the third 
Satire of the first book,^ and in the Ars Poefica, as different as 
possible from the desponding pessimism of ode and epode. And 
the Epicurean maxims which in them he offers as the sum of 
wisdom, are in his Epistles exchanged for their direct opposites : * 

*' Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremuni, 
Spernc voluptates ; nocet einpta dolore voluptas. " 

It is clear then that in the Odes, for the most part, he is an artist 
not a preacher. We must not look to them for his deepest senti- 
ments, but for such, and such only, as admitted an effective lyxic 
treatment. 

As regards their form, we observe that they are moulded strictly 
upon the Greek, some of those on lighter themes being translations 
or close imitations. But in naturahsing the Greek metres, he has 
accommodated them with the rarest skill to the harmonies of the 
Latin tongue. The Yirgilian movement differs not more from the 
Homeric, than does the Horatian sapphic or alcaic from the 
same metres as treated by their Greek inventors. The success of 
Horace may be judged by comparing his stanzas with the sapphics 
of Catullus on the one hand, and the alcaics of Statins on the 
other. The former struggle under the complicated shackles of 
Greek prosody; the latter move on the stilts of school-boy imita- 
tion. In language he is singularly choice without being a purist ; 
agreeably to their naturalised character he has interspersed the 
odes with Greek constructions, some highly elegant, others a little 
forced and bordering upon experiments on language.^ The poetry 
of his language consists not so much in its being imaginative, as in 
its employing the fittest words in the fittest places. Its general 
level is that of the best epistolary or oratorical compositions, 
according to the elevation of the subject. He loves not to soar 
into the empyrean, but often checks Pegasus by a strong curb, 
or by a touch of irony or an incongruous allusion prevents 
himself or his reader bemg carried away.^ This mingling of 

1 The "best instance is Od. III. vi. 45, where it is expressed with singular 
brevity. 

2 Od. I. xi. among many others. 

3 A. P. 391, sqq. ; S. I. iii. 99. ^ ^p i_ j-^_ ^^^ jj 55^ 

5 E.g. laborum clccipitu7\ Od. II. xiiii 38. The reader will find them all in 
Macleane's Horace. 

^ The most extraordinary instance of this is Od. IV. iv, 17, where in the 
very midst of an exalted passage, he drags in the following most inappro- 



EXCELLENCES OF THE ODES. 291 

irony and earnest is thoroughly characteristic of his genius. 
To men of realistic minds it forms one of the greatest of its 
charms. 

Among the varied excellences of these gems of poetry, we shall 
select three, as those after which Horace most evidently sought. 
They are brevity, ease, life. In the first he is perhaps unequalled. 
It is not only that what he says is terse ; in what he omits we 
recognise the master hand. He knows precisely what to dwell 
on, what to hint at, what to pass by. He is on the best under- 
standing with his reader. He knows the reader is a busy man, 
and he says — " Eead me ! and, however you may judge my work, 
you shall at least not be bored." "We recollect no instance in 
which Horace is prolix ; none in which he can be called obscure ; 
though there are many passages that require weighing, and many 
abrupt transitions that somewhat task thought. In condensed 
simplicity he is the first of Latin poets. Who that has once heard 
can forget such phrases as Nil desperandum, splendide mendax, 
non omnis morlar, didce et decorum est pro pairia mori, and a 
hundred others ? His brevity is equalled by his ease. By this 
must not be understood either spontaneity of invention or rapidity 
of execution. We know that he was a slow, nay, a laborious 
workman. 1 But he has the ars celare artem. What can be more 
natural than the transition from the praises of young ^N'ero to 
Hannibal's fine lament 1 ^ from those of Augustus to the speech 
of Juno?^ Yet these are effected with the most subtle skill. 
And even when the digression appears more forced, as in the 
well-kno^\'ii instances of Europa* and the Danaides,^ the incon-' 
gruity is at once removed by supposing that the legend in each 
case forms the main subject of the poem, and that the occasional 
introductions are a characteristic form of preamble, perhaps 
reflected from Pindar. And once more as to his liveliness. This 
is the higlicst excellence of the Odes. It never flags. If the poet 
does not rise to an exalted inspiration, he at least never sinks into 
heaviness, never loses life. To cite but one ode, in an artistic 
point of view, perhaps, the jewel of the whole collection — the 
dialogue between the poet and Lydia ; ^ here is an entire comedy 
played in twenty-four lines, in which the dialogue never becomes 

priate digression — Quihus Mos unde deductus per omne Tempus Amazonia 
&ec2cri Dextras oharmet quaercrc distuli, Kec scire fas est or,inia. Many critics, 
intolerant of tlie blot, remove it altogether, disregarding MS. authority. 

^ Ego apis Matinae more modoque . . . opeiosa parviis carmina fingo, Od. 
IV. ii. 31. 

2 Od. IV. iv. 33. 8 Od. ITT. iii. 17. * Od. TIL xxviil 

e Od. III. xi. « Od. ITL ix. 



292 HISTOEY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

insipid, tlie action never flags. Like all his love odes it is "barren 
of deep feeling, for which reason, perhaps, they have been com- 
pared to scentless flowers. But the comparison is most unjust. 
Aroma, houquet: this is precisely what they do not lack. Some 
other metaphor must be sought to embody the deficiency. At the 
same time the want is a real one ; and exquisite as are the Odes^ 
no one knew better than their author himself that they have no 
power to pierce the heart, or to waken those troubled musings 
which in their blending of pain and pleasure elevate into some- 
thing that it was not before, the whole being of him that reads them. 
The Satires and Epistles differ somewhat in form, in elabora- 
tion, and in metrical treatment, but on the whole they have 
sufficient resemblance to be considered together. The Horatian 
satire is sui generis. In the familiar modern sense it is not 
satire at all. The censorious spirit that finds nothing to praise, 
everything to ridicule, is quite alien to Horace. Neither Persius 
nor Juvenal, Boileau nor Pope, bears any real resemblance to him. 
The two former were satirists in the modern sense ; the two latter 
have caught what we may call the town side of Horace, but they 
are accomplished epigrammatists and rhetoricians, which he is not, 
and they entirely lack his strong love for the simple and the 
rural. Horace is decidedly the least rhetorical of all Eoman poets. 
His taste is as free from the contamination of the basilica^ as it is 
from that of Alexandrinism. As in lyric poetry he went straight 
to the fountain-head, seeking models among the bards of old 
Greece, so in his prose-yoetry, as he calls the Satires,'^ he draws 
from the well of real experience, departing from it neither to the 
right hand nor to the left. This is what gives his works their 
lasting value. They are all gold ; in other words, they have been 
dug for. Eefined gold all certainly are not, many of them are strik- 
ingly the reverse ; for all sorts of subjects are treated by them, 
bad as well as good. The poet professes to have no settled plan, 
but to wander from subject to subject, as the humour or the train 
of thought leads him ; as Plato says — 

tTTt] "hv 6 \6yos &yoi, ravrr} Iriov. 

Without the slightest pretence of authority or the right to dictate, 
he contrives to supply us with an infinite number of sound and 
healthy moral lessons, to reason with us so genially and with so 
frank an admission of his own equal frailty, that it is impossible 
to be angry with him, impossible not to love the gentle instructor. 
He has been accused of tolerance towards vice. That is, we think, 

^ I.e. the hall where rhetorical exhibitions were given. 

" iVm quod pcde certo cHffert sermnni, sermo vTcrvs, S. I. iv. So the title 

serinc:ics. 



HOUACE AS A MOEALTST. 293 

a great error. Horace knew men too well to be severe ; his is no 
trumpet-call, but a still small voice, wbicli pleads but does not 
accuse. He was no doubt in Ms youth a lax liver ; ^ he had 
adopted the Epicurean creed and the loose conduct that follows it. 
But he was struggling towards a purer ideal. Even in the Satires 
he is only half an Epicurean ; in the Epistles he is not one at all : 
and in proportion as he has outlived the hot blood. of youth, 
his voice becomes clearer and his faith in virtue stronger. The 
Epistles are to a great extent reflective ; he has examined his own 
heart, and depicts his musings for our benefit. Many of them are 
moral essays filled with precepts of wisdom, the more precious as 
having been genuinely thought out by the writer for himself. 
Less dramatic, less vigorous, perhaps, than the Satires, they em- 
body in choicest language the maturest results of his reflection. 
Their poetical merits are higher, their diction more chaste, their 
metre more melodious. With the Georgics they are ranked 
as the most perfect examples of the modulation of hexameter 
verse. Their movement is rippling rather than floAving, and 
satisfies the mind rather than the ear, but it is a delicious move- 
ment, full of suggestive grace. The diction, though classical, 
admits occasional colloquialisms. ^ 

Several of the Satires,^ and the three Epistles which form the 
second book, are devoted to literary criticism, and these have 
always been regarded as among the most interesting of Horace's 
compositions. His opinions on previous and contemporary poetry 
are given Avith emphasis, and as a rule ran counter to the opinion 
of his day. The technical dexterity in versification which had 
resulted from the feverish activity of the last forty years, had 
produced a disastrous consequence. All the world was seized 
with the mania for Avriting poetry : 

"Scribimus indocti doctique poemata passim." 

The young Pisos were among the number. To them the poet 
gave this friendly counsel, to lock up their creations for niae 
years, and then publish, or as we may shi-ewdly suspect he meant 
■ — destroy them. Poetry is the one thing that, if it is to be done 
at all, must be done well : 

** Mediocribus esse poetis 
Non di, non homines, non concessere columnas." 

In Horace's opinion none of the old poetry came up to this 

^ We learn this from the life by Suetonius. 

"^ E.g. invicleor, impcror, se impcdiat (S. I. x. 10) = impediatur ; amphora 
coepit institui for coepta est Others might easily be collected. 
^ S. I. iv. 10 ; S. II. i. in gi-eat part. 



294 HISTORY OF KOMAN LITERATURE. 

standard. When lie quotes two lines of Ennius ^ as defying all 
efforts to make prose of them, we cannot help fancying he is 
indulging his ironical vein. He never speaks seriously of Ennius. 
In fact he thorou^^hly disliked the array of " old masters " that were 
at once confronted with him whenever he expressed a predilection. 
It was not only the populace who yawned over Accius's tragedies, 
or the critics who lauded the style of the Salian hymn, that 
moved his resentment. These he could afford to despise. It was 
rather the antiquarian prf-po:5se5?iori-! of such men as Virgil, 
Maecenas, and Augustus, that caused him so earnestly to combat 
the love of all that was old. In his zeal there is no doubt he has 
outrun justice. He had no sympathy for the untamed vigour of 
those rough but spirited writers ; his fastidious taste could make 
no allowance for the circumstances against which they had to 
contend. To reply that the excessive admiration lavished by the 
multitude demanded an equally sweeping condemnation, is not to 
excuse Horace. One who wrote so cautiously would never have 
used exaggeration to enforce his words. The disparaging remarks 
must be regarded as expressing his real opinion, and we are not 
concerned to defend it. 

His attitude towards the age immediately preceding his own is 
even less worthy of him. He never mentions Lucretius, though 
one or two allusions ^ show that he knew and was indebted to his 
writings ; he refers to Catullus only once, and then in evident de- 
preciation,^ mentioning him and Calvus as the sole literature of a 
second-rate singer, whom he calls the ape of Hermogenes Tigellius. 
Moreover his boast that he was the first to introduce the Archi- 
lochian iambic * and the lyric metres,^ though perhaps justifiable, 
is the reverse of generous, seeing that Catullus had treated before 
him three at least of the metres to which he alludes. Mr Munro's 
assertion as to there being indications that the school of Lucretius 
and Catullus would have necessarily come into collision with that 

^ S. I. iv. 60, Postquam Discordia tetra Belli ferratos pastes portasque 
ref regit. These are also imitated by Virgil ; but they do not appear to 
show any particular beauty. 

2 S. I. V. 101 ; Ep. I. iv. 16. 

^ Neque simius isie Nil praeter Calvum et docfus cantare Ccdullum 
(S. I. X. 19). I cannot agree with Mr Martin {Horace for English Readers, 
p. 57), Avho thinks the allusion not meant to be uncomplimentar5% 

■* Parios iambos has been ingeniously explained to mean the epode, i.e. 
the iambic followed by a shorter line in the same or a different rhythm, e.g. 
Trarep AvKOL/xfia i:62ov ecppdcrca rode; ri <ras 'Jrap'f)€ipe (ppevas ; but it seems 
more natural to give Parios the ordinary sense. Cf. Archilochum proprio 
rabies armavit iaonbo, A. P. 79. 

' Ep. I. xix. 24. 



HORACE'S LITERARY CRITICISM. 295 

of tlie Augustan poets, had tlie former survived to their time, is 
supported by Horace's attitude. Yirgil and Tibullus would have 
found many points of union, so probably would Gallus; but 
Horace, Propertius, and Ovid, would certainly have been antago- 
nistic. It is unfortunate that the canons laid down by Horace 
found no followers. While Yirgil had his imitators from the 
first, and Tibullus and Propertius served as models to young 
aspirants, Horace, strangely enough, found no disciples. Persius 
in a later age studied him with care, and tried to reproduce his 
style, but with such a signal want of success that in every passage 
where he imitates, he caricatures his master. He has, however, 
left us an appreciative and beautiful criticism on the Horatian. 
method. 1 

It has often been supposed that the Ars Poetica was writen in 
the hope of regenerating the drama. This theory is based partly on 
the length at which dramatic subjects are treated, partly on the 
high pre-eminence which the critic assigns to that class of poetry. 
But he can hardly have so far deceived himself as to believe that 
any efforts of his could restore the popular interest in the legitimate 
drama which had now sunk to the lowest ebb. It should rather be 
considered as a deliberate expression of his views upon many im- 
portant subjects connected with hterary studies, written primarily 
for the young Pisos, but meant for the world at large, and not 
intended for an exhortation {adhortatio) so much as a treatise. 
Its admirable precepts have been approved by every age : and 
there is probably no composition in the world to which so few 
exceptions have been taken. 

Here we leave Horace, and conclude the chapter with a very 
short account of some of his friends who devoted themselves to 
poetry. The first is C. Valgius Eufus, who was consul in the year 
12 B.C. and to whom the ninth Ode of the second book is addressed. 
Whether from his high position or from his genuine poetical 
promise, we find great expectations held regarding him. TibuUus 
(or rather, the author of the poem ascribed to him)^ says that no 
other poet came nearer to Homer's genius, and Horace by asking 
him to celebrate the new trophies of Augustus implies that he 
cultivated an epic strain.^ Besides loftier themes he treated erotic 
subjects in elegiac verse, translated the rhetoric of Apollodorus,^ and 

^ S. i. 118, Omue va^r vitium ridenti Flaccus amico Tangit, et admissus 
circum praecordla ludit, Callidus excvsso j)opuluvi susiocndere naso. 

^ Tib. IV. i. 179, Est tibi qui vossit magnis se accingere rebus Valgius: 
aetcrno propior non alter Romero. ^ Od. II. ix. 19. 

* Quint. III. i. 18. UTiger, quoted by Teuffel, § 236, conjectures that for 
Nicandrum frustra secuti Macer atque Virgilius, we should read Valgius, in 
Qumt. X. 1. 56. 



296 mSTORY OF romajt litekature. 

wrote letters on grammar, probably in the form afterwards adopted 
by Seneca's moral epistles. Aristius Fuscus to whom the twenty- 
second Ode of the first book and the tenth Epistle are addressed, 
was a writer of some pretensions. It is not certain what line he 
followed, but in all probability the drama. He was an intimate 
acquaintance of Horace, and, it will be remembered, delivered him 
from the intrusive acquaintance on the Via Sacra. ^ Fundanius, 
who is twice mentioned by Horace, and once in very compHmen- 
tary terms as the best comic poet of the day,^ has not been fortunate 
enough to find any biographer. Titius, one of the younger men 
to whom so m.any of the epistles are addressed, was a very ambi- 
tious poet. He attempted Pindaric flights from which the genius 
of Horace shrank, and apparently he cultivated tragedy, but in a 
pompous and ranting manner.^ Iccius, who is referred to in the 
ninth Ode of Book I., and in the twelfth Epistle, as a philosopher, 
may have written poems. Julius Florus, to whom two beautiful 
epistles (I. iii. 11. ii.) are addressed, is rallied by Horace on his 
tendency to write love-poems, but apparently his efi'orts came to 
nothing. Celsus Albinovanus was, hke Florus, a friend of 
Tiberius, to whom he acted as private secretary for some time ;* 
he was given to pilfering ideas, and Horace deals him a salutary 
caution : — 

** Monitus multnmque monendus 
Privatas ut quaerat opes, et tangere vitet 
Scripta Palatinus quaecunque lecepit Apollo."" 

The last of these friends we shall notice is Julus Antonius ^ a son 
of the triumvir, who, according to Acron,'^ wrote twelve excellent 
books in epic metre on the legends of Diomed, a work obviously 
modelled on those of Euphorion, whose fourteen books of Heraclda 
were extremely popular ; in a later age Statins attempted a similar 
task in essaying the history of Achilles. The ode addressed to him 
by Horace seems to hint at a foolish ambition to imitate Pindar. 
."Besides these lesser known authors Horace knew, though he does 
not mention, the poets Ovid and Domitius Marsus ; probably also 
Propertius. With Tibullus he was long on terms of friendship, 
and one epistle and one ode ^ are addressed to him. His gentle 
nature endeared him to Horace, as his graceful poetry drew forth 
his commendation. 

1 Sat. I. ix. 61. 

^ Arguta oneretrice potcs Davoque Chremeque Eludcnte scnem comis garrire 
libdlos Unus vivoricm, Fundani. After all, this praise is equivocal. 

^ Pindarici fontis qzci non expalluit haustus. . . . An tragica desaevit et 
ampiillafur in arte ? Ep. I. iii. 10. 

* Ep. I. viii. 2. 5 Ep. T, iii. 15. « Od. IV. ii 2. 

7 Od. iv. ii. 2, quoted by Teuflfel. » Od. I. xxxiii. ; Ep. I. iv. 



CIIAPTEE rV. 

The Elegiac Poets — Gratius — Manilkfs. 

The short artificial elegy of Callimaclms and Philetas had, as we 
have seen, found an imitator in Catullus. But that poet, when he 
addressed to Lesbia the language of true passion, wrote for the 
most part in lyric verse. The Augustan age furnishes a series of 
brilliant poets who united the artificial elegiac with the expression 
of real feeling ; and one of them, Ovid, has by his exquisite formal 
polish raised the Latin elegiac couplet to a popularity unparalleled 
in imitative literature. The metre had at first been adapted to 
short epigrams modelled on the Greek, e.g., triumphal inscriptions, 
epitaphs, jeux d' esprit, &c. several examples of which have been 
quoted in these pages. Catullus and his contemporaries first treated 
it at greater length, and paved the way for the highly speciahsed 
form in which it appears in Tibullus, the earliest Augustan author 
that has come down to us. 

There are indications that Eoman elegy, like heroic verse, had 
two separate tendencies. There was the comparatively simple 
continuous treatment of the metre seen in Catullus and Virgil, 
who are content to follow the Greek rhythm, and there was the 
more rhetorical and pointed style first beginning to appear in 
Tibullus, carried a step further in Propertius, and culminating in 
the epigrammatic couplet of Ovid. This last is a peculiarly Latin 
development, unsuited to the Greek, and too elaborately artificial 
to be the vehicle for the highest poetry, but, when treated by one 
who is master of his method, admitting of a facihty, fluency, and 
incomparable elegance, which perhaps no other rhythm combines 
in an equal degree. In almost all its features it may be illustrated 
by the heroic couplet of Pope. The elegiac line is in the strictest 
sense a pendant to the hexameter ; only rarely does it introduce 
a ne^r element of thought, and perhaps never a new commence- 
ment in narration. It is for the most part an iteration, variation, 
enlargement, condensation or antithesis of the idea embodied in 
its predecessor. In the most highly finished of Grid's compositions 



298 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

this structure is carried to such a point that the syntax is rarely 
altogether continuous throughout the couplet ; there is generally a 
break either natural or rhetorical at the conclusion of the hexameter 
or within the first few syllables of the pentameter.^ The rhetorical 
as distinct from the natural period, which appears, though veiled 
with great skill, in the Yirgilian hexameter, is in Ovid's verse 
made the key to the whole rhythmical structure, and by its re- 
striction within the minimum space of two lines offers a tempting 
field to the various tricks of composition, the turn, the point, the 
climax, &c. in all of which Ovid, as the typical elegist, luxuri- 
ates, though he applies such elegant manipulation as rarely to 
over-stimulate and scarcely ever to ofiend the reader's attention. 
The criticism that such a system cannot fail to awaken is that of 
want of variety ; and in spite of the diverse modes of producing 
effect which these accomplished writers, and above all Ovid, well 
knew how to use, one cannot read them long without a sense of 
monotony, which never attends on the far less ambitious elegies of 
Catullus, and probably would have been equally absent from those 
of Cornelius Gallus. 

This ill-starred poet, whose life is the subject of Bekker's 
admirable sketch, was born at Forum Julii (Fr^jus) 69 B.C., and is 
celebrated as the friend of Virgil's youth. Full of ambition and 
endowed with talent to command or conciliate, he speedily rose in 
Augustus's service, and was the first to introduce Virgil to his 
notice. For a time all prospered ; he was appointed the first pre- 
fect of Egypt, then recently annexed as a province, but his haughti- 
ness and success had made him many enemies ; he was accused of 
treasonable conversation, and interdicted the palace of the emperor. 
To avoid further disgrace he committed suicide, in the 43d year of 

^ E.g. In the first 100 Hues of the Remedium Amoris, a long continuous 
treatise, there is only one couplet where the syntax is carried continuously 
through, V. 57, 8, Nee moriens Dido sumina vidisset ab arce Dardanias vento 
vela dedisse rates, and even here the pentameter forms a clause by itself. Con- 
trast the treatment of Catullus (Ixvi. 104-115) where the sense, rhythm, and 
syntax are connected together for twelve lines. The same applies to the open- 
ing verses of Virgil's Copa. Tate's little treatise on the elegiac couplet correctly 
analyses the formal side of Ovid's versification. As instances of the relation 
of the: elegiac to the hexameter — iteration (Her. xiii. 167), Aucupor in lecto 
mendaces caelibe somnos ; Bum careo veris gaudia falsa iuvant : variation 
(Her.xiv.5), Quodmunus extimtdt iugulo demittereferrum Sum rea: Jaudarer 
si scelus ausaforem : expansion (id. 1), Mittit Hypermnestra de tot modofra' 
tribusttna: Cetera nuptarum crimine turba iacet: condensation (Her. xiii. 1), 
Mittit et optat avians quo mittitur ire salutem, Haem.onis Haemonio Laodamia 
viro: antithesis (Am. I. ix. 3), Quae bello est habilis veneri quoque convenit 
actas ; Turpe senex miles turpe senilis amor. These illustrations might he 
indefinitely increased, and the analysis carried much further.' But the 
student will pursue it with ease for himself. Compare eh. ii. app. note 3. 



DOMITIUS MAESUS. 299 

his age (27 b.c.). His poetry was entirely taken from Alexandria ; 
he translated Euphorion and wrote four books of love-elegies to 
Cytheris. Whether she is the same as the Lycoris mentioned hy 
Virgil/ whose faithlessness he bewails, we cannot tell. No frag- 
ments of his remain, 2 but the passionate natui-e of the man, and 
the epithet durior applied to his verse by Quintilian, makes it 
probable that he followed the older and more vigorous -style of 
elegiac writing. ^ 

Somewhat junior to him was Domitius Marsus who followed 
in the same track. He was a member of the circle of Maecenas, 
though, strangely enough, never mentioned by Horace, and exer- 
cised his varied talents in epic poetry, in which he met with no 
great success, for Martial says — * 

*' Saepius in libro memoratur Persius uno 
Quam levis in to to Marsus Amazonide." 

From this we gather that Amazonis was the name of his poem. 
In erotic poetry he held a high place, though not of the first rank. 
His Fahellae and treatise on Urhanitas, both probably poetical pro- 
ductions, are referred to by Quintilian, and Martial mentions him 
as his own precursor in treating the short epigram. From another 
passage of Martial, 

*' Et Maecenati Marc cam cantaret Alexia 
Nota tanien Marsi fusca Melaenis erat,"® 

we infer that he began his career early; for he was certainly 
younger than Horace, though probably only by a few years, as he 
also receeived instruction from Orbilius. There is a fine epigram 
by Marsus lamenting the death of his two brother-poets and 
friends : 

*' Te quoque Virgilio comitem non aequa, Tibulle, 
Mors iuvenem campos misit ad Elysios. 
Ne foret aut molles elegis qiii fleret amores, 
Aut caneret forti regia bella pede. j^ 

Albius Tibullus, to whom Quintilian adjudges the palm of 
Latin elegy, was born probably about the same time as Horace 
(65 B.C.), though others place the date of his birth as late as 
that of Messala (59 B.C.). In the fifth Elegy of the third book^ 
occur the words — 

" Natalem nostri primum videre parentes 
Cum cecidit fate consul uterqu^ pari." 

1 Ed. X. 2. 

2 Two Greek Epigrams (Anthol. Gr. ii. p. 93) are assigned to him by 
Jacobs (Teuffel). 3 Quint, x. 1, 33. 

4 Mart. iv. 29, 7. ^ Id. vii. 29, 8. « v. 17, 18. 



300 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

As these words nearly reappear in Ovid, fixing the date of Ms own 
birth/ some critics have supposed them to be spurious here. But 
there is no occasion for this. The elegy in which they occur is 
certainly not by TibuUus, and may well be the work of some 
contemporary of Ovid. They point to the battle of Mutina, 43 
B.C., in which Hirtius and Pansa lost their lives. The poet's death 
is fixed to 19 B.C. by the epigram of Domitius just quoted. 

Tibullus was a Eoman knight, and inherited a large fortune. 
This, however, he lost by the triumviral proscriptions, ^ excepting 
a poor remnant of his estate near Pedum which, small as it was, 
seems to have sufficed for his moderate wants. At a later period 
Horace, writing to him in retirement, speaks as though he were 
possessed of considerable wealth — ^ 

** Di tibi divitias dederunt artemque fruendi." 

It is possible that Augustus, at the intercession of Messala, 
restored the poet's patrimony. It was as much the fashion among 
the Augustan writers to affect a humble but contented poverty, as 
it had been among the libertines of the Csesarean age to pretend 
to sanctity of life — another form of that unreality which, after 
all, is ineradicable from Latin poetry. Ovid is far more unaffected. 
He asserts plainly that the pleasures and refinements of his time 
were altogether to his taste, and that no other age would have 
suited him half so well.* Tibullus is a melancholy effeminate 
spirit. Horace exactly hits him when he bids him " chant no 
more woeful elegies,"^ because a young and perjured rival has, 
been preferred to him. He seems to have had no ambition and 
no energy, but his position obliged him to see some military 
service, and we find that he went on no less than three expedi- 
tions with his patron. This patron, or rather friend, for he was 
above needing a patron, was the great Messala, whom the poet 
loved with a warmth and constancy testified by some beautiful 
elegies, the finest jfl^rhaps being those where the general's victories 
are celebrated.^ But the chief theme of his verse is the love, ill- 
requited it would seem, which he lavished first on Delia and 
afterwards on Nemesis. Each mistress gives the subject to a 
book. Delia's real name as we learn from Apuleius was Plania,'' 
and we gather from more than one notice in the poems that 

1 Tr. II. X. 6. 2 El. I. i. 19. 3 ^p. I. iv. 7. 

* Prisca invent alios : ego me nunc denique natum Gratulor : haec aetas 
moribus apta meis (A. A. iii. 121). Ovid is unquestionably right. 

5 Od. I. xxxiii. 2. 

« El. I. 7: II. 1. Tibullus turns from battle scenes with relief to the quiet 
joys of the country. 

^ Others read Plcmtia^ but without cause. 



TIBULLUS. 301 

she was married ^ wlien Tibullus paid his addresses to her. If 
the form of these poems is borrowed from Alexandria, the 
gentle pathos and gushing feeling redeem them from all taint of 
artificiality. In no poet, not even in Enrns, is simple, natural 
emotion more naturally expressed. If we cannot praise the char- 
acter of the man, we must admire the graceful poet. Nothing can 
give a truer picture of aflTection than the following tender and 
exquisitely musical lines : 

** Non ego laudari euro : mea Delia, tecum 

Dummodo sim quaeso segnis ineisque -vocer. 
Te spectem suprema niihi cum venerit hora : 
Te teneam moriens deficients manu.^ 

Here is the same "linked sweetness long drawn out" which gives 
such a charm to Gray's elegy. In other elegies, particularly those 
which take the form of idylls, giving images of rural peace and 
plenty,^ we see the quiet retiring nature that will not be drawn 
into the glare of Eome. Tibullus is described as of great personal 
beauty, and of a candid^ and affectionate disposition. Notwith- 
standing his devotion Delia was faithless, and the poet sought dis- 
traction in surrendering to the charms of another mistress. Horace 
speaks of a lady named Glycera in this connection ; it is probable 
that she is the same as Nemesis;^ the custom of erotic poetry 
being to substitute a Greek name of similar scansion for the 
original Latin one ; if the original name were Greek the change 
was stiU made, hence Glycera might well stand for Nemesis. The 
third book was first seen by Mebuhr to be from another and 
much inferior poet. It is devoted to the praises of Neaera, and 
imitates the manner of Tibullus with not a little of his sweetness 
but with much less power. Who the author was it is impossible 
to say, but though he had little genius he was a man of feeling 
and taste, and the six elegies are a pleasing relic of this active 
and yet melancholy time. The fourth book begins with a shott 
epic on Messala, the work of a poetaster, extending over 200 lines. 
It is followed by thirteen most graceful elegidia ascribed to the 
lovers Cerinthus and Sulpicia of which one only is by Cerinthus. 
It is not certain whether this ascription is genuine, or whether, 
as the ancient life of Tibullus in the Parisian codex asserts, the 
poems were written by him under the title of Epistolae amatoriae. 
Their finished elegance and purity of diction are easily reconcilable 
with the view that they are the work of Tibullus. They abound 

» El. ii. 21. 2 lb. i. 57. 3 lb. ii. 1. 

* AIM, nostrorum sermonum candid e index, Hor. Ep. I. iv. 
^ Ov. Am. HI. ix. 32, implies that Delia and Nemesis vi^r& the two suc- 
cessive mistresses of the poet. 



302 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

in allusions to Virgil's poetry.^ At the same time tlie description 
of Sulpicia as a poetess ^ seems to point to her as authoress of the 
pieces that bear her name, and from one or two allusions 
we gather that Messala was paying her attentions that were dis- 
tasteful but hard to refuse.^ The materials for coming to a 
decision are so scanty, that it seems best to leave the authorship 
an open question. 

The rhythm of TibuUus is smooth, easy, and graceful, but tame. 
He generally concludes his period at the end of the couplet, and 
closes the couplet with a dissyllable ; but he does not like Ovid 
make it an invariable rule. The diction is severely classical, free 
from Greek constructions and antiquated harshness. In elision 
he stands midway between CatuUus and Ovid, inclining, however, 
more nearly to the latter. 

Sex. Aurelius Propertius, an Umbrian, from Mevania, 
Ameria, Assisi, or Hispellum, it is not certain which, was born 
68 B.C. or according to others 49 B.C., and lost his father and his 
estate in the same year (41 B.C.) under Octavius's second assigna- 
tion of land to the soldiers. He seems to have begun life at the 
bar, which he soon deserted to play the cavalier to Hostia (whom 
he celebrates under the name Cynthia), a lady endowed with 
learning and wit as well as beauty, to whom our poet remained 
constant for five years. The chronology of his love-quarrels and 
reconciliations has been the subject of warm disputes between 
iNobbe, Jacob, and Lachmann ; but even if it were of any impor- 
tance, it is impossible to ascertain it with certainty. 

He unquestionably belonged to Maecenas's foUowing, but was 
not admitted into the inner circle of his intimates. Some have 
thought that the troublesome acquaintance who besought Horace 
to introduce him was no other than Propertius. The man, it 
will be remembered, expresses himself willing to take a humble 
place : * 

*' Haberes 
Magnum adiutorem posset qui ferre secundas 
Hunc hominem velles si tradere. Dispeream ni 
Submosses onines." 

And as Propertius speaks of himself as living on the Esquiliae,^ 
some have, in conformity with this view, imagined him to have 
held some domestic post under Maecenas's roof. A careful reader 

^ El. IV. ii. 11, 12, urit. . . . urit. Cf. G. i. 77, 78. Again, duldssviaa, 
Airta (v, 7), cape tura libens (id. 9) ; Pone metum Cerinthe (iv. 15), will at 
once recall familiar Virgilian cadences. 

2 lb. IV. vi. 2 ; vii. ?. 3 lb. IV. viii. 5 ; X. 4. 

* S. I. ix. 45. 5 lb. iv. 23, 24; r. 8, 1. 



PFvOPERTIUS. 303 

can detect in Propertius a far less well-bred tone than is apparent 
in TibuUus or Horace. He has the air of a parvenu,'^ parading 
his intellectual wares, and lacking the courteous self-restraint 
which dignifies their style. But he is a genuine poet, and a 
generous, warm-hearted man, arid in our opinion by far the 
greatest master of the pentameter that Eome ever produced. Its 
rhythm in his hands rises at times almost into grandeui'. Ther(3 
are passages in the elegy on Cornelia (which concludes the series) 
whose noble naturalness and sthring emphasis bespeak a great 
and patriotic inspiration ; and no small part of this effect is duo 
to his vigorous handling of a somewhat feeble m-stre.^ Mechani- 
cally speaking, he is a disciple in the same school as Ovid, but his 
success in the Ovidian distich is insignificant ; for he has nothing 
of the epigramanatist in him, and his finest lines all seem to have 
come by accident, or at anyrate without effort.^ His excessive 
reverence for the Alexandrines Callimachus and Philetas, has 
cramped his muse. With infinitely more poetic fervour than 
either, he has made them his only models, and to attain their 
reputation is the summit of his ambition. It is from respect to 
their practice that he has loaded his poems with pedantic erudi- 
tion; in the very midst of passionate pleading he will turn abruptly 
into the mazes of some obscure myth, often unintelligible * to tJio 
modern reader, whose patience he sorely tries. There is no good 
poet so difficult to read through ; his faults are not such as " plead 
sweetly for pardon;" they are obtrusive and repelling, and liavo 
been more in the way of his fame than those of any extant 
writer of equal genius. He was a devoted admirer of Viigil, 
whose poems he sketches in the following graceful lines : — ^ 

" Actia Virgilio custodit (deus) litora Phoebi, 
Caesaris et fortes dicere posse rates : 
Qui nunc Aeneae Troianaque suscitat arma, 

lactaque Lavinis moenia litoribus. 

Cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Grail, 

Nescio quid maius nascitur lliade ! 



1 Whatever may be thought of his identity with Horace's lore, and it does 
not seem veiy probable, the passage, Ep. II. ii. 101, almost certainly refers 
to him, and illustrates his love of vain praise. 

2 Merivale has noticed this in his eighth volume of the History of the 
Romans. 

3 As instances of his powerful rhythm, we may select Cum morilmnda 
niger claudcrct ova liquor ; Et graviora rcjyendit iniquis peiisa quasiUis ; 
JS'on exorato slant adamante viae ; and many such pentameters as Mu'iuhts 
demissis institor in tunicis ; Candida 2nirpureis mixta papaveriOus. 

^ See El. I. ii. 15, sqq. ; I. iii. 1-8, &c. 
fi lb. ii 34, 61. 



804 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE, 

Tu canis umbrosi subter pineta Galesi 

Thyrsin et attritis Daphuih arundinibus, 
Utque decern possint corrumpere mala puellas. 

Missus et impressis haedus ab uberibus. 
Felix qui viles pomis mercaris amores t 

Huic licet ingratae Tityrus ipse canat. 
Felix intactum Cory don qui teutat Alexin 

Agricolae domini carpere delicias. 
Quamvis ills sua lassus requiescat avena, 
» Laudatur faciles inter Hamadryadas. 

Tu canis Ascraei veteris praecepta poetae, 

Quo seges in campo, quo viret uva iugo. 
Tale facis carmen, docta testudine quale 

Cyuthius impositis temperat articulis." 

The elegies that show his characteristics best are the second of 
the first book, where he prays his lady to dress modestly ; the 
seventeenth, where he rebukes himself for having left her side ; 
the twentieth, where he tells the legend of Hylas with great 
pictorial power and with the finest triumphs of rhythm; the 
beautiful lament for the death of Paetus ; ^ the dream in which 
Cynthia's shade comes to give him warning ; ^ and the patriotic 
elegy which begins the last book. Maecenas,^ it appears, had 
tried to persuade him to attempt heroic poetry, from which un- 
congenial task he excuses himself, much as Horace had done. 

In reading these poets we are greatly struck by the free and 
easy way in wliich they borrow thoughts from one another. A 
good idea was considered common property, and a happy phrase 
might be adopted without theft. Virgil now and then appro- 
priates a word from Horace, Horace somewhat oftener one from 
Virgil, Tibullus from both. Propertius, who is less original, has 
many direct imitations, and Ovid makes free with some of Virgil 
and TibuUus's finest lines. This custom was not thought to 
detract from the writer's independence, inasmuch as each had 
his own domain, and borrowed only where he would be equally 
ready to give. It was otherwise with those thriftless bards so 
roughly dealt with by Horace in his nineteenth Epistle — 

"0 imitatores, servum pecus ! ut mihi saepe 
Bilem, saepe iocum movistis." 

the Baviad and Maeviad of the Eoman poet-world. These lay 
outside the charmed sphere, and the hands they laid on the works 
of those who wrought within it were sacrilegious. In the next 
age we shall see how imitation of these great masters had become 
a regidar department of composition, so that Quintilian gives 

lEl. iii. (iv.)6(7). Mb. v. (iv.)7. 

* lb. iv. (iii.) 8 (9). Two or three other elegies are addressed to liim. 



LIFE OF OVID. 305 

elaborate rules for making a proper use of it. At this time 
originality consisted in introducing some new form of Greek song. 
Yirgil made Theocritus and Hesiod speak in Latin. Horace had 
brought over the old Aeolian bards ; Propertius, too, must make 
his boast of having enticed Callimachus to the Tiber's banks — 

" Primus ego ingredior puro de fonte sacerdos 
Itala per Graios orgia ferre clioros.^ 

In the Middle Ages he was almost lost ; a single copy, defaced 
with mould and almost illegible, was found in a wine cellar in 
Italy, 1451 a.d. Quintilian tells us there were some in his day 
who preferred him to Tibullus. 

The same critic's remark on the brilliant poet who now comes 
before us, P. Ovidius ISTaso, is as follows : " Ovidius utroque Icisci- 
vior" and he could not have given a terser or more comprehensive 
criticism. Of all Latin poets, not excepting even Plautus, Ovid 
possesses in the highest degree the gift of facility. His words 
probably express the literal truth, when he says — 

" Sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos, 
Et quod tentabam scribere versus erat." 

This incorrigibly immoral but inexpressibly graceful poet was bom 
at Sulmo in the Pelignian territory 43 b.c. of wealthy parents, 
whose want of liberality during his youthful career he deplores, 
but by which he profited after their death. Of equestrian rank, 
with good introductions and brilliant talents, he was expected to 
devote himself to the duties of public hfe. At first he studied 
for the bar; but so slight was his ambition and so unfitted was his 
genius for even the moderate degree of severe reasoning required 
by his profession, that he soon abandoned it in disgust, and turned 
to the study of rhetoric. For some time he declaimed under the 
first masters, ArelHus Fuscus and Porcius Latro,^ and acquired a 
power of brilliant improvisation that caused him to be often 
quoted in the schools, and is evidenced by many reminiscences in 
the writings of the elder Seneca.^ A short time was spent by him, 
according to custom, at Athens,* and while in Greece he took the 
opportunity of visiting the renowned cities of Asia Minor. He 
also spent some time in Sicily, and returned to Rome probably at 
the age of 23 or 24, where he allowed himself to be nominated 
triumvir capitalis, decemvir litibus iudicandis, and centumvir^ in 
quick succession. But in spite of the remonstances of his friends 
he finally gave up all active work, and began that series of love- 
poems which was at once the cause of his popularity and of his fall. 

1 iv. (iil.) 1, 3. 2 On these see next chapter, p. 320. 

3 See Contr. ii. 11. •* Thst. I. ii. 77. 



306 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

His first mistress was a lady whom he calls Corinna, but whose real 
name is not known. That she was a member of the demi-monde 
is probable from this fact ; as also from the poet's strong assertion 
that he had never been guilty of an intrigue with a married 
woman. The class to which she belonged were mostly Greeks 
or Easterns, beautiful and accomplished, often poetesses, and 
mingling with these seductive qualities the fickleness and greed 
natural to their position, of which Ovid somewhat unreasonably 
complains. To her are dedicated the great majority of the Amoves, 
his earliest extant work. These elegant but lascivious poems, 
some of which perhaps were the same which he recited to large 
audiences as early as his twenty-second year, were published 13 
B.C., and consisted at first of five books, which he afterwards 
reduced to three. ^ No sooner were they before the public than 
they became universally popular, combining as they do the per- 
sonal experiences already made familiar to Eoman audiences 
through Tibullus and Propertius, with a levity, a dash, a gaiety, 
and a brilliant polish, far surpassing anything that his more serious 
predecessors had attained. During their composition he was 
smitten with the desire (perhaps owing to his Asiatic tour) to 
write an epic poem on the wars of the gods and giants, but 
Corinna, determined to keep his muse for herself, would not allow 
him to gratify it.^ 

The Heroidcs or love-letters from mythological heroines to their 
(mostly) faithless spouses, are declared by Ovid to be an original 
importation from Greece.^ They are erotic suasoriae, based on 
the declamations of the schools, and are perhaps the best appre- 
ciated of all his compositions. They present the Greek mythology 
under an entirely new phase of treatment. Yirgil had complained* 
that its resources were used up, and in Propertius we already see 
that allusive way of dealing mth it which savours of a general 
satiety. But in Ovid's hands the old myths became young again, 
indeed, younger than ever ; and people wonder they could ever 
have lost their interest. His method is the reverse of Virgil's or 
Livy's.^ They take pains to make themselves ancient; he, with 
wanton effrontery, makes the myths modern. Jupiter, Juno, the 
whole cii'cle of Olympus, are transformed into the hommes et 
femmes galantes of Augustus's court, and their history into a 
clironiquG scandaleuse. The immoral incidents, round which a 

^ So says the introduction ; but it is of very doubtful authenticity. 
2 Am. IL i. 11. 

2 A. A. III. 346, ignotum hoe aliis ille novavit opus. ■* G. iil. 4, sqq. 
* These remarks apply equally to the Metamorphoses, and indeed to all 
Ovid's works. 



THE ART OF LOVE. 307 

veil of poetic sanctity had "been cast by tlie great consecrator time, 
are here displayed in all their mundane pruriency. In the Meta- 
morphoses Jupiter is introduced as smitten with the love of a 
nymph, Dictynna; some compunctions of conscience seize him, and 
the image of Juno's wrath daunts him, but he finally oyercomes 
his fear with these words — 

** Hoc fiirtura certe coniux mea nesciet (inquit) ; 
Aut si rescierit, sunt sunt iurgia tanti ? " 

So, in the Heroides, the idea of the desolate and love-lorn Ariadne 
writing a letter from the barren isle of ISTaxos is in itself ridiculous, 
nor can aU the pathos of her grief redeem the irony. Helen 
vrishes she had had more practice in correspondence, so that she 
might perhaps touch her lover's chilly heart. Ovid using the 
language of mythology, reminds us of those heroes of Dickens 
who preface their communications by a wink of intelligence. 

His next venture was of a more compromising character. In- 
toxicated with popularity, he devoted three long poems to a 
systematic treatment of the Art of Love, on which he lavished all 
the graces of his wayward talent, and a combination of mytho- 
logical, literary, and social allusion, that seemed to mark him out 
for better things. He is careful to remark at the outset that this 
poem is not intended for the virtuous. The frivolous gallants, 
whose sole end in life is dissipation, with the objects of their 
licentious passion, are the readers for whom he caters. Eut he 
had overshot his mark. The Amores had been tolerated, for they 
had followed precedent. Eut even they had raised him enemies. 
The Art of Love produced a storm of indignation, and without 
doubt laid the foundations of that severe displeasure on the 
part of Augustus, which found vent ten years later in a terrible 
punishment. For Ovid was doing his best to render the emperor's 
reforms a dead letter. It was difficult enough to get the laws 
enforced, even with the powerful sanction of a public opinion 
guided by writers like Horace and Yirgil. Eut here was a brillian 
poet setting his face right against the emperor's will The 
necessity of marriage had been preached with enthusiasm by two 
unmarried poets ; a law to the same effect had been passed by two 
unmarried consuls ;i a moral regime had been inaugurated by a 
prince whose own morals were or had been more than dubious. 
All this was difficult; but it had been done. And now the 
insidious attractions of vice were flaunted in the most glowing 
colours in the face of day. The young of both sexes yielded to 
the charm. And what was worse, the emperor's own daughter, 

^ Lex Papia-Poppaea 



308 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

whom he had forced to stay at home carding wool, to wear only 
such garments as were spun in the palace, to affect an almost 
prudish delicacy, the proud and lovely Julia, had been detected in 
such profligacy as poured bitter satire on the old monarch's moral 
disciphne, and bore speaking witness to the power of an inherited 
tendency to vice. The emperor's awful severity bespoke not 
merely the aggrieved father but the disappointed statesman. Julia 
had disgraced his home and ruined his policy, and the fierce resent- 
ment which rankled in his heart only waited its time to burst 
forth upon the man who had laboured to make impurity attrac- 
tive. ^ Meanwhile Ovid attempted, two years later, a sort of recan- 
tation in the Remedia Amoris, the frivolity of which, however, 
renders it as immoral as its predecessor though less gross; and he 
finished his treatment of the subject with the Medicamina Faciei\ 
a sparkling and caustic quasi-didactic treatise, of which only a 
fragment survives. ^ During this period (we know not exactly 
when) was composed the tragedy of Medea^ which ancient critics 
seem to have considered his greatest work.^ Alone of his writings 
it showed his genius in restraint, and though we should probably 
form a lower estimate of its excellence, we may regret that time has 
not spared it. Among other works written at this time was an 
elegy on the death of Messala (3 a.d.), as we learn from the 
letters from Pontus.* Soon after he seems, like Prince Henry, to 
have determined to turn over a new leaf and abandon his old 
acquaintances. Yirgil, Horace, and Tibullus, were dead; there 
was no poet of eminence to assist the emperor by his pen. Ovid 
was beyond doubt the best qualified by his talent, but Augustus 
had not noticed him. He turned to patriotic themes in order to 
attract favourable notice, and began his great work on the national 
calendar. Partly after the example of Propertius, partly by his 
o^Tn. predilection, he kept to the elegiac metre, though he is 
conscious of its betraying him into occasional frivolous or amatory 
passages where he ought to be grave. ^ " Who would have thought 
(he says) that from a poet of love T should have become a patriotic 
bard?"^ While writing the Fcisti he seems to have worked also 
at the Metamor piloses, a heroic poem in fifteen books, entirely 
devoted to mythological stories, mostly of transformations caused 
by the love or jealousy of divine wooers, or the vengeance of 

^ It is probable that the Art ofLove,wsiS published 3 B.C., the year of Julia's 
exile. 

^ Some have, quite without due grounds, questioned the authenticity of 
this fragment. 

3 Tac. De Or. xiii ; Quint. X. i. 98. * i. vii. 27. 

* See the witty invocation to Venus, Bk. IT. init. ^ F. ii. 8. 



HIS EXILE. 309 

their aggrieved spouses. There are passages in this long work of 
exceeding beauty, and a prodigal wealth of poetical ornament, 
which has made it a mine for modern poets. Tasso, Ariosto, 
Guarini, Spenser, Milton, have all drunk deep of this rich foun- 
tain. ^ The skill Avith which the different legends are woven into 
the fabric of the composition is as marvellous as the frivolous 
dilettantism which could treat a long heroic poem in such a way. 
The Metamorphoses were finished before 7 a.d. ; the Fasti were 
only advanced to the end of the sixth book, when all further prose- 
cution of them was stopped by the terrible news, which struck the 
poet like a thunderbolt, that he was ordered to leave Eome for- 
ever. The cause of his exile has been much debated. The osten- 
sible ground was the immorality of his writings, and especially of 
the Art of Love, but it has generally been taken for granted that a 
deeper and more personal reason lay behind. Ovid's own hints 
imply that his eyes had been witness to something that they should 
not, which he calls a crimen {i.e. a crime against the emperor). ^ 
The most probable theory is that Augustus took advantage of 
Ovid's complicity in the younger Julia's misconduct to wreak the 
full measure of his long-standing indignation against the poet, 
whose evil counsels had helped to lead astray not only her but his 
daughter also. He banished him to Tomi, an inhospitable spot 
not far from the mouth of the Danube, and remained deaf to all 
the piteous protestations and abject flatteries which for ten years 
the miserable poet poured forth. 

This punishment broke Ovid's spirit. He had been the spoilt 
child of society, and he had no heart for any life but that of 
Eome. He pined away amid the hideous solitudes and the bar- 
barous companionship of Goths and Sarmatians. His very genius 
was wrecked. iN'ot a single poem of merit to be compared with 
those of former times now proceeded from his pen. Nevertheless 
he continued to write as fluently as before. Now that he was 
absent from his wife — for he had been thrice married — this very 
undomestic poet discovered that he had a deep afl'ection for her. 
He wrote her endearing letters, and reminded her of their happy 
hours. As she was a lady of high position and a friend of the 
Empress Livia, he no doubt hoped for her good offices. But her 

^ The most beautiful portions are perhaps the following: — The Story of 
Phaethon (ii. 1), the Golden Age (1. 89), Pyramus and Thisbe (iv. 55). Baucis 
and Philemon, a rustic idyl (viii. 628), Narcissus at the Fountain (iii. 407), 
The Cave of Sleep (xi. 592), Daedalus and Icarus (viii. 152), Cephalus and 
Procris (vii. 661), The passion of Medea (vii. 11), from which we may glean 
some idea of his tragedy. 

2 The chief passages bearing on it are, Tr. II. 103; III. y. 49; VI. 27 J 
IV. X. 90. Pont. 1. vi. 25 ; II. ix. 75 ; III. iii. 75. 



310 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

prudence surpassed lier conjugal devotion. Neither she, nor the 
noble and influential friends^ whom he implored in piteous accents 
to intercede for him, ever ventured to approach the emperor on a 
subject on which he was known to be inexorable. And when 
Augustus died and Tiberius succeeded, the vain hopes that had 
hitherto buoyed up Ovid seem to have quite faded away. From 
such a man it was idle to expect mercy. So, for two or three 
years the wretched poet lingered on, still solacing himself with 
verse, and with the kindness of the natives, who sought by every 
means to do him honour and soothe his misfortune, and then, in 
the sixtieth year of his age, 17 A.D., he died, and was buried in 
the place of his dreary exile. 

Much as we may blame him, the severity of his punishment 
seems far too great for his offence, since Ovid is but the child of 
his age. In praising him, society praised itself ; as he says with 
natural pride, "The fame that others gain after death, I have 
known in my lifetime." He was of a thoroughly happy, thought- 
less, genial temper ; before his reverse he does not seem to have 
known a care. His profligacy cost him no repentance ; he could 
not see that he had done wrong ; indeed, according to the lax 
notions of the time, his conduct had been above rather than below 
the general standard of dissipated men. The palliations he alleges 
in the second, book of the Tristia, which is the best authority for 
his life, are in point of fact, unanswerable. To regard his age as 
wicked or degenerate never entered into his head. He delighted 
in it as the most refined that the world had ever known ; "It is," 
he says jokingly, "the true Golden Age, for every pleasure that 
exists may be got for gold." So wedded was he to literary com- 
position that he learnt the Sarmatian language and wrote poems 
in it in honour of Augustus, the loss of which, from a philological 
point of view, is greatly to be regretted. His muse must be con- 
sidered as at home in the salons and fashionable coteries of the 
great. Though his style is so facile, it is by no means simple. 
On the contrary, it is one of the most artificial ever created, and 
could never have been attained at all but by a natural aptitude, 
backed by hard study, amid highly-polished surroundings from 
childhood. These Ovid had, and he wielded his brilliant instru- 
ment to perfection. What euphuism was to the Elizabethan 
courtiers, what the langue galante was to the court of Louis XIY., 
the mythological dialect was to the gay circles of aristocratic Eome.^ 

^ SucTi names as Messala, Graecinus, Fompeius, Cotta, Fahius Maximus^ 
occur in his Epistles, 

2_Tliis continual dwelling on mythological allusions is sometimes quite 
ludicrous, e.g.^ when he sees the Hellespont frozen over, his first thought is, 



POEMS ATTEIBUTED TO OVID. 311 

It was select, polislied, and spiced witli a flavour of profanity. 
Hence, Ovid could never be a popular poet, for a poet to be really 
popular must be eitber serious or genuinely bumorous ; wbereas 
Ovid is neitber. His irony, exquisitely ludicrous to those who 
can appreciate it, falls flat upon less cultivated minds, and the lack 
of strength that lies beneath his smooth exterior^ would unfit him, 
even if his immorality did not stand in the way^ for satisfying or 
even pleasing the mass of mankind. 

The Ibis and Halieuticon were composed during his exile ; the 
former is a satiric attack upon a person now unknown, the latter a 
prosaic account of the fish found in the neighbourhood of Tomi. 

Appended to Ovid's works are several graceful poems which 
have put forward a claim to be his workmanship. His great 
popularity among the schools of the rhetoricians both in Eome 
and the provinces, caused many imitations to be circulated under 
his name. The most ancient of these is the Nux elegia, which, if 
not Ovid's, must be very shortly posterior to him ; it is the com- 
plaint of a walnut tree on the harsh treatment it has to sufi'er, 
sometimes in very difficult verse, ^ but not inelegant. Some of the 
Priapeia are also attributed to him, perhaps with reason; the 
Consolatio ad Liviam, on the death of Drusus, is a clever produc- 
tion of the Eenaissance period, full of reminiscences of Ovid's 
verse, much as the Ciris is filled with reminiscences of Yirgil.^ 

Ovid was the most brilliant figure in a gay circle of erotic and 
epic poets, many of whom he has handed down in his Epistles^ 
others have transmitted a few fragments by which we can estimate 
their power. The eldest was Ponticus, who is also mentioned by 
Propertius as an epic writer of some pretensions. Another was 
Macer, whose ambition led him to group together the epic legends 
antecedent and subsequent to those narrated in the Iliad and 

** WinuT was the time for Leander to have gone to Hero : there would have 
been no fear of drowning ! " 

^ His abject flattery of Augustus hardly needs remark. It was becoming 
the regular court language to address him as Jupiter or TonoMs: when Virgil, 
at the very time that Octavius's hands were red with the proscriptious, could 
call him a god {semper erit Deus), we cannot wonder at Ovid fifty years later 
doing the same. 

"^ E.g. 69-90. 

^ We may notice with regard to the Ciris that it is very much in Ovid's 
manner, though far inferior. I think it may be fixed with certainty to a 
}»eriod succeeding the publication of the ]\Ietamorphoses. The address to 
Messala, v. 54, is a mere blind. The goddess Sophia indicates a later view 
than Ovid, but not necessarily post- Augustan. The goddess Crataeis (from 
the eleventh Odyssey), v, &1, is a novelty. The frivolous and pedantic object 
of the poem (to set right a confusion in the myths), makes it possible that 
it was produced under the blighting government of Tiberius. Its continual 
imitations make it almost a Virgiliau Cento. 



312 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITEKATURE. 

Odyssey. There was a Pompeius Macer, an excellent man, wlio 
with his son committed suicide under Tiberius/ his daughter 
having been accused of high treason, and unable to clear herself. 
The son is probably identical with this friend of Ovid's. Sabinus, 
another of his intimates, who wrote answers to the Heroides^ was 
equally conspicuous in heroic poetry. The title of his poem is 
not known. Some think it was Troezen f but the text is corrupt. 
Ovid implies^ that his rescripts to the Her aides were complete ; it 
is a misfortune that we have lost them. The three poems that 
bear the title of A. Sabini Epistolae, and are often bound with Ovid's 
works, are the production of an Italian scholar of the fifteenth 
century. Tuticanus, who was born in the same year with Ovid, 
and may perhaps have been the author of Tibullus's third book, is 
included in the last epistle from Pontus* among epic bards. 
Cornelius Severus, a better versifier than poet,^ wrote a Sicilian 
War,^ of which the first book was extremely good. In it occurred 
the verses on the death of Cicero, quoted by the elder Seneca' 
with approbation : 

Oraque magnaninmm spirantia paene virorum 
In rostris iacuere suis : sed enini abstulit omnis> 
Tanquam sola foret, rapti Ciceronis imago. 
Tunc redeunt animis ingentia consults acta 
lurataeque manus deprensaque foedera noxae 
Patriciumque nefas extincturn : poena Cethegi 
Deiectusque redit votis Catilina nefandis. 
Quid favor aut coetus, pleni quid honoribus anni 
Profuerant ? sacris exculta quid artibus aetas I 
Abstulit una dies aevi decus, itftaque luctu 
Conticuit Latiae tristis facundia linguae. 
Unica sollicitis quondam tutela salusque, 
Egiegium semper patriae caput, ille senatus 
Vindex, ille fori, legum ritusqne togaeque, 
Publica vox saevis aeternum obmutuit armia. 
Informes voltus sparsamque cruore nefando 
Canitiem sacrasque manus operumque ministras 
Tantorum pedibus civis proiecta superbis 
Proculcavit ovans nee lubrica fata deosque 
Eespexit. Nullo luet hoc Antonius aevo. 
Hoc nee in Eniathio mitis victoria Perse, 
Nee te, dire Syphax, non fecerat hoste Philippo ,* 
Inque triumphato ludibria cuncta lugurtha 
Afuerar-t. nostraeque cadens ferus Hannibal irae 
Membra tamen Stygias tulit inviolata sub umbras. 

Prom these it will be seen that he was a poet of considerable 
power. Another epicist of some celebrity, whom Quintilian 

^ Tac. Ann. vi. 18. 2 po^t, IV. xvi. 3 Am. II. xviii. 27. 

'*IV.xvi. 27. « Quint. X. i. 89. 

« I.e. that waged with Sextus Pompey. ^ guas. vi. 26. 



GRATIUS. 313 

thouglit worth reading, was Pedo Albinovanus ; he was also an 
epigrammatist, and in conversation remarkable for his brilliant wit. 
There is an Albinus mentioned by Priscian who is perhaps in- 
tended for him. Other poets referred to in the long list which 
closes the letters from Pontus are Eufus, Largus, probably the 
perfidious friend of Gallus so mercilessly sketched by Bekker, 
Camerixus, Lupus, and Montanus. All these are little more than 
names for us. The references to them in succeeding writers will be 
found in Teuffel. Eabirius is worth remarking for the extra- 
ordinary impression he made on his contemporaries. Ovid speaks 
of him as Magni Rahlrius oris,^ a high compliment ; and Yelleius 
Paterculus goes so far as to couple him with Virgil as the best 
representative of Augustan poetry ! His Alexandrian War was 
perhaps drawn from his own experience, though, if so, he must 
have been a very young man at the time. 

From an allusion in Ovid^ we gather that Gratius^ was a poet 
of the later Augustan age. His work on the chase {Cynegetica) has 
come down to us imperfect. It contains little to interest, notwith- 
standing the attractiveness of its subject: but in truth all didactic 
poets after Virgil are without freshness, and seem depressed rather 
than inspired by his success. After alludmg to man's early 
attempts to subdue wild beasts, first by bodily strength, then by 
rude weapons, he shows the gradual dominion of reason in this as 
in other human actions. Diana is also made responsible for the 
huntsman's craft, and a short mythological digression follows. 
Then comes a description of the chase itself, and the implements 
and weapons used in it. The list of trees fitted for spearshafts 
(128-149), one of the best passages, will show his debt to the 
Georgics — more than half the lines show traces of imitation. 
Next we have the different breeds of dogs, their training, their 
diseases, and general supervision discussed, and after a digression 
or two — the best being a catalogue of the evils of luxury — the 
poem (as we possess it) ends with an account of the horses best 
fitted for hunting. • The technical details are carefuUy given, and 
would probably have had some value; but there is scarcely a 
trace of poetic enthusiasm, and only a moderate elevation of 
style. 

The last Augustan poet we shall notice is M. Manilius, whose 
dry subject has caused him to meet with very general neglect. 
His date Avas considered doubtful, but Jacob has shown thi.t he 
began to write towards the close of Augustus's reign. The first 

1 Pont. VI. xvi. 5. 2 Pont, VI. xvi. 34. 

^ The name Faliscus is generally attached to him, but apparently witlioui 
an}' certain authority. 



314 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

book refers to tlie defeat of Varus ^ (7 a.d.), to wliich, therefore, it 
must be subsequent, and the fourth book contemplates Augustus 
as still alive, 2 though Tiberius had already been named as his suc- 
cessor.^ The fifth book must have appeared after the interval of 
Augustus's death ; and from one passage which seems to allude 
to the destruction of Pompey's theatre,* Jacob argues that it was 
written as late as 22 a.d. The danger of treating a subject on 
which the emperor had his own very decided views ^ may have 
deterred Manilius from completing his work. Literature of all 
kinds was silent under the tyrant's gloomy frown, and the weak 
style of this last book seems to reflect the depressed mind of its 
author. 

The birth and parentage of Manilius are not known. That he 
was a foreigner is probable, both from the uncouthness of his style 
at the outset, and from the decided improvement in it that can be 
traced through succeeding books. Eentley thought him an Asiatic; 
if so, however, his lack of florid ornament would be strange. It 
is more likely that he was an African. But the question is com- 
plicated by the corrupt state of his text, by the obscurity of his 
subject, and by the very incomplete knowledge of it displayed by 
the author. It was not considered necessary to have mastered a 
subject to treat of it in didactic verse. Cicero expressly instances 
Aratus^ as a man who, with scarce any knowledge of astronomy, 
exercised a legitimate poetical ingenuity by versifying such know- 
ledge as he had. These various causes make Manilius one of the 
most difficult of authors. Tew can wade through the mingled 
solecisms in language and mistakes in science, the empty verbiage 
that dilates on a platitude in one place, and the jejune abstract 
that hurries over a knotty argument in another, without regretting 
that so unreadable a poet should have been preserved.'' 

1 I. 898. 2 iv, 935. 3 ii3 764. 4 y. 513. 

^ Manilius hints at the general dislike of Tiberius in one or two obscure 
passages, e.g. I. 455 ; 11. 290, 253 ; where the epithets tqrtus, pronus, applied 
to Capricorn, which was Tiberius's star, hint at his character and his dis- 
grace. Cf. also, I. 926. « De Or. I. 16. 

'' It may interest the reader to catalogue some of his peculiarities. We 
find admota vioenibus arma (iv. 37), a phrase unknown to military language; 
amhiguusterrae (II. 231), agilcs metae Fhoebi (I. 199) = circum quas agiliter 
se vertit ; Solcrtia facit artcs (I. 73) = invenit. Attempts at brevity like, 
fallente solo (I, 240) = Soli declivitas nos longitudiue fallens ; Mocnia fcreiis 
(I. 781) = muralem coronam ; inaequalos Cycladcs (iv. Q>2>7),i.e. abinaequalibus 
procellis vexatae, a reminiscence from Hor. (Od. II. ix. 3). Constructions 
verging on the illegitimate, as scict, quae poena scquetur (iv. '2.10)\nota aperire 
viam, sc. sidera(I, 31); Sibi nullo monstrante loqmmtur Ncptuno dchcre genus 
(II. 223); iS'tms foreius(IV. 885); nostrum.que parentem Pars sua perspicimus. 
The number might be indefinitely increased. See Jacob's full index. 



MANILIUS. 315 

And yet his book is not altogether without interest. The sub- 
ject is called Astronomy, but should rather be called Astrology, 
for more than half the space is taken up with these baseless 
theories of sidereal influence which belong to the imaginary side 
of the science. But in the exordia and perorations to the several 
books, as well as in sundry digressions, may be found matter of 
greater value, embodying the poet's views on the great questions 
of philosophy.^ On the whole he must be reckoned as a Stoic, 
though not a strictly dogmatic one. He begins by giving the 
different views as to the origin of the world, and lays it down that 
on these points truth cannot be attained. The universe, he goes 
on to say, rests on no material basis, much less need we suppose 
the earth to need one. Sun, moon, and stars, whirl about with- 
out any support ; earth therefore may well be supposed to do the 
same. The earth is the centre of the universe, whose motions are 
circular and imitate those of the gods.^ The universe is not 
finite as some Stoics assert, for its roundness (which is proved by 
Chrysippus) implies infinity. Lucretius is wrong in denying 
antipodes ; they follow naturally from the globular shape, from 
which also we may naturally infer that seas bind together, as well 
as separate, nations.^ All this system is held together by a 
spiritual force, which he calls God, governing according to the 
law of reason.* He next describes the Zodiac and enumerates the 
chief stars with their influences. Following the teaching of 
Hegesianax,^ he declares that those which bear human names are 
superior to those named after beasts or inanimate things. The 
study of the stars was a gift direct from heaven. Kings first, and 
after them priests, were guided to search for wisdom, and now 
Augustus, who is both supreme ruler and sipreme pontiff^ follows 
his divine father in cultivating this great science. Mentioning 
some of the legends which recount the transformations of mortals 
into stars, he asserts that they must not be understood in too 
gross a sense. ^ Nothing is more wonderful than the orderly 
movement of the heavenly bodies. He who has contemplated 
this eternal order cannot believe the Epicurean doctrine. Human 

1 These are worth reading. They are— I. 1-2.50, 483-539 ; II. 1-150, 
722-970; III. 1-42 ; IV. 1-118 (the most elaborate of all), 866-935 ; V. 
640-019, the account of Perseus and Andromeda. 

"•^ A hint borrowed from Plato's Timaeus. 

' I. 246. An instance of a physical conclusion influencing moral or 
political ones. The theory that seas separate countries has always gone 
with a lack of progress, and vice versa. 

^ Vis animae divina regit, sacroqioe meatu Coiispirat deus et t&cita ratione 
guhernat (I. 250). 

MIyg. P.A. ii. 14. «I. 458. 



316 HISTOEY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

generations pass away, but the earth and the stars abide for ever. 
Surely the universe is divine. Passing on to the milky way, he gives 
two fanciful theories of its origin, one that it is the rent burnt by 
Phaethon through the firmament, the other that it is milk from 
the breast of Juno. As to its consistency, he wavers between the 
view that it is a closely packed company of stars, and the more 
poetical one that it is formed by the white-robed souls of the just. 
This last theory leads him to recount in a dull catalogue the well- 
worn Hst of G-reek and Eoman heroes. Comets are mysterious 
bodies, whose origin is unkno\vn. The universe is full of fiery 
particles ever tending towards conglomeration, and perhaps their 
impact forms comets. Whether natural or supernatural, one 
thing is certain — they are never without effect on mankind. 

In the second book he begins by a complaint that the list of 
attractive subjects is exhausted. This incites him to essay an 
unified path, from which he hopes to reap no stolen laurels ^ as 
the bard of the universe ! ^ He next expounds the doctrine of 
an ever-present spirit moving the mass of matter, in language 
reflecjted from the sixth Aeneid. Men must not seek for mathe- 
matical demonstration. Considerations of analogy are enough to 
awaken conviction. The fact that, e.^., shell-fish are aifected by 
the moon, and that all land creatures depend on solar influence, 
should forbid us to dissociate earth from heaven, or man's activity 
from the providence of the gods. How could man have any 
knowledge of deity unless he partook of its nature 1 The rest of 
the book gives a catalogue of the diff'erent kinds of stars, their 
several attributes, and their astrological classification, ending with 
the Dodecatemorion and Odotopos. 

The third book, after a short and offensively allusive descrip- 
tion of the labours of preceding poets, sketches the twelve cdlila 
or accidents of human life, to each of which is assigned its special 
guardian influence. It then passes to the horoscope, which it 
treats at length, giving minute and various directions how to draw 
it. The extreme importance attached to this process by Tiberius, 
and the growing frequency with which, on every occasion, Chal- 
deans and Astrologers were now consulted, made the poet specially 
careful to treat this subject with clearness and precision. It is 
accordingly the most readable of all the purely technical parts of 
the work. The account of the tropics, with which the book closes, 
is singularly inaccurate, but contains some rather elegant descrip- 
tions : ^ at the tropic of Cancer summer always reigns, at Capricorn 
there is p'irpetual winter. The book here breaks off quite 

* IT. 58. a Mv,ndi Fates, il. 148. 

» Xg. that of spring, V. 652-668. 



I 



MANILIUS. 317 

abruptly; apparently he intended to compose the epilogue at 
some future time, but had no opportunity of doing it. 

The exordium to the fourth book, which sometimes rises into 
eloquence, glorifies fate as the ultimate divine power, but denies 
it either will or personality. He fortifies his argument, according 
to hivS wont, by a historical catalogue, which exemplifies the 
harshness that, except in philosophical digressions, rarely leaves his 
style. Then follow the horoscopic properties of the Zodiacal 
constellations, the various reasons for desiring to be born under 
one star rather than another, a sort of horoscopico-zodiacal account 
of the world, its physical geography, and the properties of the 
zones. These give occasion for some graphic touches of history 
and legend ; the diction of this book is far superior to that of the 
preceding three, but the wisdom is questionable which reserves 
the " good wine " until so late. Passing on to the ecliptic, he drags 
in the legends of Deucalion, Phaethon, and others, which he treats 
in a rhetorical way, and concludes the book with an appeal to 
man's reason, and to the necessity of allowing the mental eye free 
vision. Somewhat inconsistently with the half-religious attitude 
of the first and second books, he here preaches once more the 
doctrine of irresistible fate, which to most of the Eoman poets 
occupies the place of God. The poem practically ends here. He 
himself implies at the opening of Book V., that most poets would 
not have pursued the theme further ; apparently he is led on by his 
interest in the subject, or by the barrenness of his invention 
which could suggest no other. The book, which is unfinished, 
contains a description of various stars, with legends interspersed 
in which a more ambitious style appears, and a taste which, 
though rhetorical and pedantic, is more chastened than in the 
earlier books. 

It will be seen from the above resume that the poem discusses 
several questions of great interest. Eising above the technicali- 
ties of the science, Manilius tries to preach a theory of the 
imiverse which shall displace that given by Lucretius. He is a 
Stoic combating an Epicurean. A close study of Lucretius is 
evidenced by numerous passages,^ and the earnestness of his moral 
conclusions imitates, though it does not approach in impressive- 
ness, that of the great Epicurean. Occasionally he imitates 
Hoi'ace,^ much more often Yirgil, and, in the legends, Ovid.^ 

^ E.g. the transitions Nunc age (iii. 43), Et quoniam dictum est (iii. 385); 
Fcrcijjc (iv. 818), &c. ; the frequent use of alliteration (i. 7, 52, 57, 59, 63, 
84, 116, &c.) ; of asyndeton (i. 34 ; ii. 6) ; polysyndeton (i. 99, sqq.). 

^ E.g. x>e(lihus quid iungcre ccrtis (iii. 35). 

^ E.g. in those of Phaethon, and Perseus and Andromeda. 



318 H ISTORY OF ROMAN LITER AT UEE. 

His technical manipulation of the hexameter is good, though 
tinged with monotony. Occasionally he indulges in licenses which 
mark a deficient ear ^ or an imperfect comprehension of the theory 
of quantity. 2 He has few archaisms,^ few Greek words, consider- 
ing the exigencies of his subject, and his vocabulary is greatly 
sujDerior to his syntax ; the rhetorical colouring which pervades 
the work shows that he was educated in the later taste of the 
schools, and neither could understand nor desired to reproduce the 
simplicity of Lucretius or Yirgil.^ 

1 E.g. alia proseminat ttsiis (i. 90) ; inde species (ii, 155), &c. 

2 FacLs ad (i. 10) ; caelum et (i. 795); Conor et (in tliesi. iii. 3); pudent 
(iv. 403). 

^ E.g. clepsisset (i. 25); itiner (i. 88); compagine (i. 719); sorti abl. 
(i. 813); audireque (ii, 479). 

* E.g. the plague so depopulated Athens that (ii. 891) de tanto quondam, 
pomilo vix contigit heresj At the battle of Actiiua (ii. U16); in Conto 
quacsitus rector Olym^i / 



CHAPTER y. 

Peose-weiters of the Augustan Period. 

Public oratory, which had held the first rank among studies 
under the EepubHc, was now, as we have said, ahnost extinct. In 
the earher part of Augustus's reign, Pollio and Messala for a time 
preserved some of the traditions of freedom, but both found it 
impossible to maintain their position. Messala retired into 
dignified seclusion; Polho devoted himself to other kinds of 
composition. Somewhat later we find Messalinus, the son of 
Messala, noted for his eloquent pleading; but aa he inherited 
none of the moral qualities which had made his father dangerous, 
Augustus permitted him to exercise his talent. He was an in- 
timate friend of Ovid, from whom we learn details of his life ; 
but he frittered away his powers on trifling jests ^ and extempore 
versifying. The only other name worthy of mention is Q. 
Haterius, who from an orator became a noted declaimer. The 
t<*stimonies to his excellence vary ; Seneca, who had often heard 
him, speaks of the wonderful volubility, more Greek than Pioman, 
which in him amounted to a fault. Tacitus gives him higher 
praise, but admits that his writings do not answer to his living 
fame, a persuasive manner and sonorous voice having been indis- 
pensible ingredients in his oratory. ^ The activity before given to 
the state was now transferred to the basilica. Eut as the full sway 
of rhetoric was not established until quite the close of Augustus's 
reign, we shall reserve our account of it for the next book, merely 
noticing the chief rhetoricians, who flourished at this time. The 
most eminent were Porcius Latro, Puscus Arellius, and 
Albucius Silus, who are frequently quoted by Seneca ; Rutilius 
Lupus,^ who was somewhat younger ; and Seneca, the father of 

^ He was aa adept in the res culinaria. Tac. An. vi. 7, bitterly notes his 
degenerai^y. 

^ Hatcrii canorum illud et profluens cum ipso simul extinctum est, 
Ann. iv. 61. 

^ The author of two books on figures of speech, an abridged translation of 
the work of Gorgias, a contemporary Greek rhetorician. 



320 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

tlie celebrated pliilosoplier.i Fuscus was an Asiatic, and seems to 
have been one of the first who declaimed in Latin. Foreign pro- 
fessors had previously exercised their own and their pupils' 
ingenuity in Greek ; Cicero had almost invariably declaimed in 
tliat language, and there can be no doubt that this was a much 
less harmful practice; but now the bombast and glitter of the 
Asiatic style flaunted itself in the Latin tongue, and found in the 
increasing number of provincials from Gaul and Spain a body of 
admirers who cultivated it with enthusiasm. Cestius Pius, a 
native of Smyrna, espoused the same florid style, and was even 
preferred by his audience to such men as PoUio and Messala. To 
us the extracts from these authors, preserved in Seneca, present the 
most wearisome monotony, but contemporary criticism found in 
them many grades of excellence. The most celebrated of all was 
Porcius Latro, who, like Seneca himself, came from Spain. 
There is a special character about the Spanish literary genius 
which will be more prominent in the next generation. At pre- 
sent it had not sufficiently amalgamated with the old Latin cul- 
ture to shine in the higher branches. But in the rhetorical 
schools it gradually leavened taste by its attractive qualities, and 
men like Latro must be regarded as wielding immense influence 
on Eoman style, though somewhat in the background, much as 
Antipho influenced the oratory of Athens. 

Annaeus Seneca of Gorduba (Cordova),^ the father of ITovatus, 
Seneca, and Mela the father of Lucan, belonged to the equestrian 
order, was born probably about 54 B.C. and lived on until after 
the death of Tiberius.^ The greater part of this long life, longer 
even than Varro's, was spent in the profession of eloquence, for 
which in youth he prepared himself by studying the manner of 
the most renowned masters. Cicero alone he was not fortunate 
enough to hear, the civil wars having necessitated his withdrawal 
to Spain.* He does not appear to have visited Eome more than 
twice, but he shows a thorough knowledge of the rhetoricians of 
the capital, whence we conclude that his residence extended over 
some time. 5 The stern discipline of Caesar's wars had taught the 
Spaniards something of Eoman severity, and Seneca seems to 
have adopted with a good will the maxims of Eoman life.^ He 
possessed that elan with which young races often carry all before 

Seneca and Quintilian quote numerous other names, as Passienus, Porri' 
peius, Silo, Papirhts Flavianus, Alfius Flavus, &c. The reader should con- 
sult Teuffel, where all that is known of these worthies is given. 
^ The praenomen M. is often given to him, but without authoritv. 
* Probably until 38 A.n. * Contr. I. praef. ii. ^ gee Teuiiel, § 264. 

His son speaks of his home as antiqica et severa. 



ANNAEUS SENECA. 321 

them when they give the fresh vigour of their understanding to 
master an existing system ; his memory, as he himself tells us, 
was so prodigious that he could recite 2000 names correctly after 
once hearing them;i and, with the taste for showy ornament 
which his race has always evinced, he must have launched himself 
without misgiving into the competition of the schools. Neverthe- 
less, in his old age, when he came to look back on his life, he 
felt half ashamed of its results. His sons had asked him to write 
a critical account of the greatest rhetoricians he had known ; he 
gladly acceded to their wish, and has embodied in his work vast 
numbers of extracts, drawn either from memory or rough notes, 
specifying the manner in which each professor treated his theme ; 
he then adds his own judgment on their merits, often interspers- 
ing the more tedious discussions with hon-mots or literary anec- 
dotes. The most readable portions are the prefaces, where he 
writes in his own person in the unaffected epistolary style. We 
learn from them many particulars about the lives of the great 
rhetor es and the state of taste and literary education. But in the 
preface to the tenth book (the last of the series) he expresses an 
utter weariness of a subject which not even the reminiscences of 
happier days could invest with serious interest. There are no 
indications that Seneca rose to the first eminence. His extra- 
ordinary memory, dihgsnce, and virtuous habits gained him 
respect from his pupils and the intimacy of the great. But there 
is nothing in his writings to show a man of more than average 
capacity, who, having been thrown all his life in an artificial and 
narrowing profession, has lost the power of taking a vigorous 
interest in things, and acquired the habit of looking at questions 
from what we might call tJie examiner^ s point of view. We 
have remains of two sets of compositions by him ; Controversiae, 
or legal questions discussed by way of practice for actual cases, 
divided into ten books, of which about half are preserved ; and 
Suasoriaej or imaginary themes, such as those ridiculed by 
Juvenal: * 

** Consilium dedimus Sullae, privatus ut altum 
Dorrniret." 

These last are printed first in our editions, because, being abstract 
in character and not calling for any special knowledge, they were 
better suited for beginners. The style of the book varies. In 
the prefaces it is not inelegant, and shows few traces of the 
decline, but in the excerpts from Latro and Fuscus (which are 

^ Caesar, it will be remembered, was greatly struck with the attention 
given to the cultivation of the memory in the Druiuical colleges of Gaul. 

X 



322 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

perhaps nearly in their own words) we observe the silver Latinity 
ah-eady predominant. Much is written in a very compressed 
manner, reading like notes of a lecture or a table of contents. 
There is, however, a geniality about the old man which renders 
him, even when uninteresting, not altogether unpleasing. 

We pass from rhetoric to history, and here we meet with one of 
the great names of Eoman letters, the most eloquent of all 
historians, Titus Livius Patavinus. The exact date of his birth 
is disputed, but may be referred to 59 or 57 b.c. at Pcdavium 
(Padua), a populous and important town, no less renowned for its 
strict morals than for its opulence.^ Little is kno\^ii of his life, 
but he seems to have been of noble birth ; his relative, C. Cor- 
nehus, took the auspices at Pharsalia, and the aristocratic tinge 
which pervades his work would lead to the same inference. 
Padua was a bustling place, where public-speaking was rife, 
and aptitude for affairs common; thus Livy was nursed in 
eloquence and in scenes of human activity. Nothing tended 
to turn his mind to the contemplation of nature — at least we see 
no signs of it in his work, — his conceptions of national deve]op- 
ment were uncomphcated by reference to the share that physical 
conditions have in moulding it; man alone, and man as in all 
respects self-determining, has interest for him. His gifts are pre- 
eminently those of an orator ; the talent for developmg an idea, 
for explaining events as an orderly sequence, for estabhshing 
conclusions, for moving the feelings, for throwing himself into a 
cause, for clothing his arguments in noble language, shine con- 
spicuous in his work, while he has the good faith, sincerity, and 
patriotism which mark off the orator from the mere advocate. For 
some years he remained at Padua studying philosophy ^ and prac- 
tising as a teacher of rhetoric, declaiming after the manner of 
Seneca and his contemporaries. Eeference is made to these 
declamations by Seneca and Quintilian, and no doubt they were 
worth preserving as a grade in his intellectual progress and as 
having helped to produce the artistic elaborateness of his speeches. 
In 31 B.C. or thereabouts, he came to Eome, where he speedily 
rose into favour. But though a courtier, he was no flatterer. He 
praised Brutus and Cassius,^ he debated whether Caesar was 
useful to the state,* his whole history is a praise of the old 

1 Many of these facts are taken from Seeley's I.ivy, Bk. I. Oxford, 1871. 

^_L. Seneca (Epp. xvi. 5, 9) says: " Scri2mt enwi ct dialogos quos nmi magis 
jphilosophiae annumeres qicam Mstoriae et ex x>rofcsso liliilosoioMartt contincntes 
lihros." These half historical, half philosophical dialogues may perhaps 
have resembled Cicero's dialogue De Eqniblica : Hertz sii}jjwses them to 
have been of the same character as the \oyiaropiKa of Varro (Seeley, v. 18). 

■'» Tac. Ann. iv. 3i. 4 Q,^.^^ ^^ q. 



OPPORTUNE APPEARANCE OF LIVY'S HISTORY. 323 

Eepublic, his preface states that Eome can neither bear her evils, 
nor the remedy that has been appHed to them (by which it is pro- 
bable he means the Empire), and we know that Augustus called him 
a Pompeian, though, at the same time, he cannot have been an im- 
prudent one, otherwise he could hardly have retained the emperor's 
friendship. As regards the date of his work, Professor Seeley 
decides that the first decade was written between 27 and 20 B.C., 
the very time during which the Aeneid was in process of composi- 
tion. The later decades were tlirown off from time to time until 
his death at Patavium in 17 a.d. Indications exist to show that 
they were not revised by him after publication, e.g., the errors 
into which he had been led by trusting to Valerius Antias were 
not erased ; but he was careful not to rely on his authority after- 
wards. That he enjoyed a high reputation is clear from the fact 
recorded by Pliny the younger, that a man .journeyed to Pome 
from Cadiz for the express purpose of seeing him, and, having suc- 
ceeded, returned at once.^ The elder Pliny ^ draws a picture of him 
at an advanced age studying with undiminished zeal at his great 
work. The " old man eloquent " used to say that he had written 
enough for glory, and had now earned rest ; but his restless mind 
fed on labour and would not lie idle. When completed, his book 
at once became the authoritative history of Eome, after which 
nothmg was left but to abridge or comment upon it. 

The state of letters at Eome, while unfavourable to strictly 
political history, was ripe for the production of a work like Livy's. 
Augustus, Agrippa, and Pollio, had founded public libraries in 
which the older works were accessible. The emperor took a 
keen interest in all studies ; he encouraged not merely poets but 
philologians and scientific writers, and he was not indisposed to 
protect historical study, if only it were treated in the way he 
approved. Eabirius, Pedo Albinovanus, and Cornelius Severus 
liad written poems on the late Avars, Ovid and Propertius on the 
legends embodied in the calendar; the rival jurists Labeo and 
Capito had wrought the Juris Responsa into a body of legal 
doctrine ; Strabo was giving the world the result of his travels in a 
universal geogi^aphy; Pompeius Trogus, Labienus, Pollio, and 
the Greeks Dionysius, Dion, and Timagenes, had all treated 
Eoman history ; Augustus had published a volume of his own 
Gesta ; all things seem to demand a comprehensive dramatic 
account of the growth of tlie Eoman state, which should trace the 
process by which the world became Eoman, and Eome became 
united in the hands of Caesar. 

1 PHii. Ep. ii. 3. 2 pj.aef, ad Nat. Hist. 



324 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

Hitherto Eoman Mstory had been imperfectly treated. It is 
unfortunate that such crude conceptions of its nature prevailed. 
Even Cicero says, opus lioc unum maxime oratorium.^ It had 
been either a register of events kept by aristocratic pontiffs 
from pride of race, or a series of pictures for the display of 
eloquence. ]^either the flexible imagination, nor the patient saga- 
city, nor the disinterested view of life necessary for a great histo- 
rian, was to be found among the Eomans. There was no true 
criticism. For instance, while Juvenal depicts the first inhabi- 
tants of the city, according to tradition, as rude marauders, ^ 
Cicero commends their virtues and extols the wisdom of the 
early kings as the Athenian orators do that of Solon ; and in his 
Caio Maior makes of the harsh censor a refined country gentle- 
man and a student of Plato ! Varro had amassed a vast collec- 
tion of facts, a formidable array of authorities ; Dionysius had 
spent twenty years in studying the monuments of Eome, and yet 
had so little intelligence of her past that he made Eomulus a 
philosopher of the Sophistic type ! Caesar and Sallust gave true 
narratives of that which they had themselves known, but they did 
little more, l^o ancient writer, unless perhaps Thucydides, has 
grasped the truth that history is an indivisible whole, and that 
humanity marches according to fixed law towards a determinate 
end. The world is in their eyes a stage on which is played for 
ever the same drama of life and death, whose fate moves in a 
circle bounded by the catastrophes of cities mortal as their 
inhabitants, without man's becoming by progress of time either 
better or more powerful. In estimating, then, the value of Livy's 
work, we must ask. How far did he possess the qualifications 
necessary for success *? We turn to his preface and find there the 
moralist, the patriot, and the stylist ; and we infer that his fullest 
idea of history is of a book in which he who runs can read the 
lesson of virtue ; and, if he be a lawgiver, can model his legislation 
npon its high precedents, and, if he be a citizen, can follow its salu- 
tary precepts of conduct. An idea, which, however noble, is 
certainly not exhaustive. It may entitle its possessor to be called 
a lofty writer, but not a great historian. This is his radical defect. 
He treats history too little as a record, too little as a science, too 
much as a series of texts for edification. 

How far is he faithful to his authorities ? In truth, he never 
deserts them, never (or almost never) advances an assertion without 

1 De. Leg. i. 2. See also Book 11. ch. iii. init. 

^ Maiorum qidsquis iirimus fuit iUetuorum Ant pastor fuit aid .lliiJ quod 
diccre nolo, Sat. viii. tUt. 



HIS AUTflOrJTIES. 325 

them.^ His fidelity may be inferred from the fact that when he 
follows Polybius alone, he adds absolutely nothing, he merely throws 
life into his predecessor's dead periods. Moreover, he writes, after 
the method of the old annalists, of events year by year; he rarely 
conjectures their causes or traces their connexion, he is willing to 
efface himself in the capacity of exponent of what is handed down. 
Whole passages we cannot doubt, especially in the early books, 
are inserted from Fabius and the other ancients, only just enough, 
changed to make them polished instead of rude ; and it is aston- 
ishing how slight the changes need be when the hand that makes 
them is a skilful one. So far as we can judge he never alters the 
testimony of a witness, or colours it by interested presentation. 
His chief authorities for the early history are Licinius Macer, 
Claudius Quadrigarius, Gn. Gellius,^ Sempronius Tuditanus, Aelius 
Tubero, Cassius Hemina, Calpurnius Piso, Valerius Antins, Acilius 
Glabrio,^ Porcius Cato, Cincius, and Pictor.^ These writers, or at 
least the most ancient of them, Cato and Pictor, founded their 
investigations on such records as treaties, public documents — e.g. 
the annals, censors' and pontiffs' commentaries, augural books, 
books relating to civil procedure kept by the pontifis, &c. ;^ laws, 
lists of magistrates,^ LihriLintei kept in the temple of Juno Moneta; 
all under the reservation noticed before, that the majority perished 
in the Gallic conflagration.'' These Professor Seeley classes as 
pure sources. The rest, which he calls corrupt, are the funeral 
orations, inscriptions in private houses placed under the Ima- 
gines,^ poems of various kinds, both gentile and popular, in all of 
which there was more or less of intentional misrepresentation. 
Por the history after the first decade new authorities appear. The 
chief are Polybius, Silenus the Sicilian a friend of Hannibal, 
Caelius Antipater, Sisenna, Caecilius, Eutilius, and the Fasti, 
which are now almost or quite continuous; and still further on he 
followed Posidonius, and perhaps for the Civil Wars Asinius Pollio, 
Theophanes, and others. There is evidence that these were care- 
fully digested, but by instalments. For instance, he did not read 
Polybius until he came to write the Punic wars. Hence he missed 

^ E.g. III. 26. "When Cincinnatuswas called to the dictatorship, he was 
either digging cr ploughing; authorities differed. All agreed in this, that 
he was at some rustic work." Cf. iv. 12, and i. 24, where we have the sets 
of opposing authorities, utrumque traditiir, audores utroque trahunt being 
appended. 

^ A contempornry of the Gracchi ; very little is known of him. 

3 Quaestor, 203 B.C. He wrote in Greek. A Latin version by a Claudius, 
whom some identify with Quadrigarius, is mentioned by Plutarch. 

4 TP)r tlie^e see back, VA. T. ch. 9. ^ gee App. p. 103. « Fasti. 
' tee ^. 68. ^ Liv. viii. 40, Falsia imayimcm titulis. 



326 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

several antiquarian notices {e.g. tlie treaty with Carthage) wMch 
would have helped him in the first decade. StiU he uses the authors 
he quotes with moderation and fidelity. When the Fasti omit or 
confuse the names of the consuls, he tells us so ; ^ when authorities 
differ as to whether the victory lay with the Eomans or Samnites,^ 
he notes the fact. In the early history he is reticent, where 
Dionysius is minute; he is content with the broad legendary out- 
line, where Dionysius constructs a whole edifice of probable but 
utterly uncertified particulars. In the important task of sifting 
authorities Livy follows the plan of selecting the most ancient, 
and those who from their position had best access to facts. In 
compHcated cases of divergence he trusts the majority,^ the earliest,* 
or the most accredited,^ particularly Fabius and Piso.^ He does 
not analyse for us his method of arriving at a conclusion. 
" Erudition is for him a mine from which the historian should 
draw forth the pure gold, leaving the mud where he found it." 
Many of his conclusions are reached by a sort of instinct, which 
by practice divines truth, or rather verisimilitude, which is but 
too often its only available substitute. 

So far as enthusiasm serves (and without it criticism, though it 
may succeed in destroying, is helpless to construct), Livy penetrates 
to the spirit of ancient times. He says himself, in a very cele- 
brated passage where he bewails the prevailing scepticism, ^ " Non 
sum nescius ab eadem neglegentia qua nihil portendere deos volgo 
nunc credunt neque nuntiari admodum ulla prodigia in publicum 
neque in annales referri. Ceterum et mihi vetustas res scribentl 
nescio quo pacto antiquus fit animus et quaedam religio tenet, quae 
illi prudentissimi viri pubhce suscipienda curarint, ea pro indignis 
habere quae in meos annales referam." This " antiquity of soul " 
is not criticism, but it is an important factor in it. In the history 
of the kings he is a poet. If we read the majestic sentence in 
which the end of Eomulus is described, ^ we must admit that if the 
event is told at all this is the way in which it should be told. 
We meet, however, here and there, with genuine insertions from 
antiquity which spoil the beauty of the picture. Take, e.g., the law 
of treason,^ terrible in its stern accents, " Duumviri perdueUionem 
iudicent : si a duumviris provocarit, provocatione certato : si vincent, 
caput obnubito : infelici arbori reste suspendito : verberato vel intra 
pomoerium vel extra pomoerium," where, as the historian remarks, 
the law scarcely hints at the possibility of an acquittal. In the 
struggles of the young Eepublic one traces the risings of political 

1 viii. 18, 1. 2 ix, 44, 6. 3 i. 7. 4 ii_ 40, 10. 

5 XXX. 45. 6 i. 46 ; z. 9. ? xliii. 13. » i. 16. 

» i. 26. 



HIS IGNORANCE OF THE GROWTH OF THE CONSTITUTION. 327 

passion, not of individuals as yet, but of parties in the state. 
After the Punic wars have begun individual features predominate, 
and what has been a rich canvass becomes a speaking portrait. 
Constitutional questions, in which Livy is singularly ill informed, 
are hinted at,^ but generally in so cursory and unintelligent a way, 
that it needs a K'iebuhr to elicit their meaning. And Livy is 
throughout led into fallacious views by his confusion of the 
mob {faex Romuli^ as Cicero calls it) which represented the 
sovereign people in his day, with the sturdy and virtuous plebs, 
whose obstinate insistance on their right forms the leading thi-ead 
of Eoman constitutional development. Conformably with his 
promise at the outset he traces with much more effect the gradu- 
ally increasing moral decadence. It is when Eome comes into 
contact with Asia that her virtue, already tried, collapses almost 
without a struggle. The army, once so steady in its discipline, 
riots in revelry, and marches against Antiochus with as much. 
recklessness as if it were going to butcher a flock of sheep. ^ The 
soldiers even disobey orders in pillaging Phocaea; they become 
cowards, e.g., the Illyrian garrison surrenders to Perseus; and 
before long the abominable and detested oriental orgies gain a 
permanent footing in Eome. Meanwhile, the senate falls from its 
old standard, it ceases to keep faith, its generals boast of perfidy,^ 
and the corrupted fathers have not the face to check them.* The 
epic of decadence proceeds to its denouement, and if we possessed 
the lost books the decline would be much more evident. It must 
be admitted that in this department of his subject Livy paints 
mth a master's hand. But nothing can atone for his signal 
deficiency in antiquarian and constitutional knowledge. He had 
(it has been said) a taste for truth, but not a passion for it. Had 
he gone into the Aedes Nympliarum, he might have read on brass 
the so-called royal and tribunician laws; he might have read the 
treaties with the Sabines, with Gabii and Carthage; the Senatus 
Consulta and the Plebi Scita. Augustus found in the ruined 
temple of Jupiter Fucinus ^ the spolia opima of Cossus, who was 
there declared to have been consul when he won them. All the 
authorities represented him as military tribune. Livy, it seems, 
never took the trouble to examine it. When he professes to cite 
an ancient document, it is not the document itself he cites but its 
copy in Fabius. He seems to think the style of history too ornate 

^ E.g., the consuls being both plebeian, the auspices are unfavourable 
(xxLii. 31). Again, the senate is described as degrading those who feared to 
return to Hannibal (xxiv. 18). Varro, a noviis homo, is chosen consul (xxii. 34). 

2 xxxvii. 39. 3 xlii. 74. 

4 Of. xlii 21 ; xliii. 10 ; xlv. 34. ^ j^^ 20, o. 



328 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

to admit such rugged interpositions, ^ and when he inserts them he 
offers a half apology for his boldness. This dilettante way of 
regarding his sources deserves all the censure Niebuhr has cast on 
it. If it were not for the fidelity with which he has incorporated 
without altering his better-informed predecessors, the investiga- 
tions of Niebuhr and his successors would have been hopelessly 
unverifiable. The student who wishes to learn the value of Livy 
for the history of the constitution should read the celebrated 
Lectures (VII. and YIII.) of I^iebuhr's history. Their publication 
dethroned him, nor has he yet been reinstated. But it must be 
remembered that this censure does not attach to him in other 
aspects, for instance as a chronicler of Eome's wars, or a biographer 
of her worthies. As a geographer, however, he is untrustworthy ; 
his description of Hannibal's march is obscure, and many battles 
are extremely involved. It is evident he was a clear thinker only 
on certain points; his preface, e.g., is intricate both in matter and 
manner. 

It remains to consider him shortly as a philosophic and as an 
artistic historian. On these points some excellent remarks are 
made by M. Taine.- When we read or write a history of Eome we 
ask. Why was it that Eome conquered the Samnites, the Carthagi- 
nians, the Etruscans 1 How was it that the plebeians gained equal 
rights with the patricians % The answer to such questions satis- 
fies the intelligent man of the world who desires only a clear and 
consistent view. But philosophy asks a yet further why ? Why 
was Eome a conquering state? why these never-ceasing wars'? 
why was her cult of abstract deities a worship of the letter which 
never rose to a spiritual idea % In the resolution of problems like 
these lies the true delight of science ; the former is but infor- 
mation ; this is knowledge. Has Livy this knowledge % It does 
not follow that the philosophic historian should deduce with 
mathematical precision; he merely narrates the events in their 
proper order, or chooses from the events those that are representa- 
tive ; he groups facts under their special laws, and these again 
under universal laws, by a skilful arrangement or selection, or else 
by flashes of imaginative insight. Livy is no more a philosopher 
than a critic ; he discovers laws, as he verifies facts, imjDcrfectly. 
The treatment of history known to the ancients did not admit of 
separate discussions summing up the results of previous narrative ; 

^ viii. 11, Ilaec etsi omnis divini humanique memoria aholevit nova 'pere- 
grinaque omnia 2}riscis ac j^cdriis pracfcrendo, haud ab re dxLxi xcrMs quoque 
I'vsis ut tradita nuncupataque sunt referre. 

2 Siir Titc-Live. The writer has been frequently indebted to this clear 
and striking essay for examples of Livy's historical qualities. 



HIS LACK OF CLEARNESS OF VIEW. 329 

for pliilosophic views we are as a rule driven to consult the inserted 
speeches. Livy's speeches often reveal considerable insight; 
Manlius's account of the Gauls in Asia/ and Camillus's sarcastic 
description of their behaviour round Eome,^ go to the root of their 
national character and lay bare its weakness. The Samnites are 
criticised by Decius in terms which show that Livy had analysed 
the causes of their fall before Eome.^ Hannibal arraigns the 
narrow policy of his country as his true vanquisher. These and 
the hke are as effectual means of inculcating a general truth as a 
set discussion. To these numerous and perhaps more striking 
passages bearing on the internal history might be added.* Eut a 
historian should have his whole subject under command. It is 
not" enough to illuminate it by flashes. The speeches, besides 
being in the highest degree unnatural and unhistoric, are far too 
eloquent, moving the feelings instead of the judgment.^ "For 
an annalist," to quote Mebuhr, " a clear survey is not necessary ; 
but in a work like Livy's, it is of the highest importance, and no 
great author has this deficiency to such an extent as he. He neither 
knew what he had written nor what he was going to write, but 
wrote at hap-hazard." To put all facts on an equal footing is to 
be like a child threading beads. To know how to select repre- 
sentative facts, to arrange according to representative principles is 
an indispensable requisite, as its absence is an irremediable defect 
in a writer Avho aspires to instruct the world. 

To turn to his artistic side. In this he has been allowed to 
stand on the highest pinnacle of excellence. Whether he paints 
the character of a nation or an individual ; whether he paints it 
by pausing to reflect on its elements, as in the beautiful studies of 

^ xxxviii. 17. ^ V. 44. ^ vii. 34. 

^ As the invective of tlie old centuiion who had been scourged for debt 
(ii. 23) ; Canuleius's speech on marriage (iv. 3) ; the admirable speech of 
Lignstinus showing how the city drained her best blood (xlii. 34). 

* We cannot refrain from quoting an excellent passage from Dr. Arnold on 
the unreality of these cultivated harangues. Speaking of the sentiments 
Livy puts into the mouth of the old Romans, he says "Doubtless the char- 
acter of the nobility and commons of Rome underwent as great changes in 
the course of years as those which have taken place in our own country. 
The Saxon thanes and franklins, the barons and knights of the fourteenth 
century, the cavaliers and puritans of the seventeenth, the country gentle- 
men and monisd men of a still later period, all these have their own char- 
acteristic features, which he who would really write a liistory of EngLmd 
must labour to distinguish and to represent with spirit and fidelity ; nor 
would it be more ridiculous to paint the members of a Wittenagemot in the 
costume of our present House of Commons than to ascribe to them our 
habits of thinking, or the views, sentiments, and language of a modern 
historian." 



330 HISTOKY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

Cato and Cicero,^ or hj describing it in action, whicli is the poeti- 
cal and dramatic mode, or by making it express itself in speech, 
which is the method the orator favours most, he is always great 
He was a Venetian, and I^iebuhr finds in him the rich colouring 
of the Venetian school ; he has also the darker shadow which that 
colouring necessitates, and the bold delineation of form which 
renders it not meretricious but noble. When he makes the old 
senators speak, we recognise men with the souls of kings. Man- 
lius regards the claim of the Latins for equal rights as an outrage 
and a sacrilege against Capitoline Jupiter, with a truly Eoman 
arrogance which would be grotesque were it not so grand. ^ The 
familiar conception we form in childhood of the great Roman 
worthies, where it does not come from Plutarch, is generally drawn 
from Livy. 

The power of his style is seen sometimes in stately movement, 
sometimes in lightning-like flashes. When Hannibal at the foot 
of the Alps sees his men dispirited, he cries out, " Yo7c arc scaling 
the walls of Rome ! " When the patricians shrink in fear from 
the dreaded tribunate, the consuls declare that tlieir emhlems of 
office are a funeral pageant.^ All readers will remember pithy 
sentences like these : ^^ Hannibal has grown old in Cainpania;"^ 
*' The issue of loar will show who is in the right.^^^ 

His rhetorical training discovers itself in the elaborate exactness 
with which he disposes of all the points in a speech. The most 
artificial of aU, perhaps, and yet at the same time the most eftective, 
is the pleading of old Horatius for his son.^ It might have come 
from the hands of Porcius Latro, or Arellius Puscus. The orator 
treats truth as a means ; the historian should treat it as an end. 
Livy wishes us not so much to know as to admire his heroes. 

His language was censured by PoUio as exhibiting a Patavinitas, 
but what this was we know not. To us he appears as by far the 
purest writer subsequent to Cicero. Of the great orator he was a 
warm admirer. He imitated his style, and bade his son-in-law 
read only Cicero and Demosthenes, or other writers in proportion 
as they approached these two. He models his rhythm on the 
Ciceronian period so far as their different objects permit. But 
poetical phrases have crept in,^ marring its even fabric ; and other' 
indications of t'OO rich a colouring betray the near advent of the 
Silver Age. 

^ The latter given by Seneca the elder, the former xxxix. 40. 
^ viii. 5. 3 ii 54^ r, a ^xx. 20. 

' xxi. 10. 6 i, 26, 10. 

"^ E.g. Haec uU dicta dedit : ubi Mars est atrocissimus :- stupens animi : 
laetapascua, &c. (Teuflel). 



POMPEIUS TKOGUS. 331 

As tlie book progresses the style becomes more fixed, until in 
the third decade it has reached its highest point j in the later 
books, as we know from testimony as well as the few specimens 
that are extant, it had become garrulous, like that of an old man. 
His work was to have consisted of fifteen decades, but as we have 
no epitome beyond Book CXLII., it vras probably never finished. 
Perhaps the loss of the last part is not so serious as it seems. "We 
have thirty books complete and the greater part of five others ; 
but no more, except a fragment of the ninety-first book, has been 
discovered for several centuries, and in all probability the remainder 
is for ever lost. Livy was so much abridged and epitomized that dur- 
ing the Middle Ages he was scarcely read in any other form. Com- 
pilers like Florus, Orosius, Eutropius, &c. entirely supplied his place. 

A word should perhaps be said about Pompeius Trogus, who 
about Livy's time wrote a universal history in forty-four books. 
It was called Historiae Phili]?picae, and was apparently arranged 
according to nations ; it began with Ninus, the Nimrod of classical 
legend, and was brought down to about 9 a.d. AVe know the 
work from the epitomes of the books and from Justin's abridgment, 
wliich is similar to that of Florus on Livy. "Who Justin was, and 
where he lived, are not clearly ascertained. He is thought to have 
been a philosopher, but if so, he was anything but a talented 
one ; most scholars place his floruit under the Antonines. He 
seems to have been a faithful abbreviator, at least as far as this, 
that he has added nothing of his OAvn. Hence we may form a 
conception, however imperfect, of the value of Trogus's labours. 
Trogus was a scientific man, and seems to have desired the fame 
of di, polymath. In natural science he was a good authority,^ but 
though his history must have embodied immensely extended re- 
searches, it never succeeded in becoming authoritative. 

Among the -writers on applied science, one of considerable 
eminence has descended to us, the architect Vitruvius Pollio. 
He is very rarely mentioned, and has been confounded with 
Vitruvius Cerdo, a freedman who belongs to a later date, and 
whose precepts contradict in many particulars those of the first 
Vitruvius. His birth-place was Formiae; he served in the 
African War (46 B.C.) under Caesar, so that he was born at least 
as early as 64 b.c.^ The date of his work is also uncertain, but 
it can be appro xinuitely fixed, for in it he mentions the emperor's 
sister as his patroness, and as by her he probably means eta via, 
who died 11 B.C., the book must have been written before that 
year. As, moreover, he speaks of one stone theatre only as existing 

^ Auctor e severissimis, Plin. xi. 52, 275. 

2 The view that he flourished under Titus is altogether unworthy of credit. 



332 HISTOKY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

in Eome, whereas two others were added in 13 B.a, the date ig 
further thrown back to at least 14 b.c. As he expressly tells 
lis it was written in his old age, and he must have been a young 
man in 46 b.c., when he served his first campaign, the nearer we 
bring its composition to the latest possible date {i.e. 14) the more 
correct we shall probably be. He was of good birth and had had 
a liberal education ; but it is clear from the style of his work that 
he had either forgotten how to write elegantly, or had advanced his 
literary studies only so far as was necessary for a professional man.^ 
His language is certainly far from good. 

He began life as a military engineer, but soon found that his 
personal defects prevented him from succeeding in his career. ^ 
He therefore seems to have solaced himself by setting forward in 
a systematic form the principles of his art, and by finding fault 
with the great body of his professional brethren.^ The dedication 
to Augustus implies that he had a practical object, viz. to furnish 
him with sound rules to be applied in building future edifices and, 
if necessary, for correcting those already built. He is a patient 
student of Greek authors, and adopts Greek principles unreservedly ; 
in fact his work is little more than a compendium of Greek author- 
ities.^ His style is affectedly terse, and so much so as to be fre- 
quently obscure. The contents of his book are very briefly as 
follows : — 
Book L General description of the science — education of the 
architect — best choice of site for a city — disposi- 
tion of its plan, fortifications, public buildings, &c. 
„ IL On the proper materials to be used in building, pre- 
ceded, like several of Pliny's books, by a quasi- 
philosophical digression on the origin and early 
history of man — the progress of art — ^Vitruvius 
gives his views on the nature of matter 
„ III. TV. On temples — an account of the four orders, Doric, 

Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite, 
„ Y. On other public buildings. 
„ YI. On the arrangement and plan of private houses. 
„ YII. On the internal decoration of houses. 
„ YIII. On water supply — the different properties of different 
waters — the way to find them, test them, and con- 
vey them into the city. 
„ IX. On sun dials and other modes of measuring time. 
„ X. On machines of all kinds, civil and military. 

1 See pref. to Book VI. 2 n p^ef. 6. 

' ]\Iany of these facts are borrowed from the Diet. Biog. s. v. 
4 Pref. to Book YII. 



FENESTELLA. 333 

As will be seen from this analysis, the work is both comprehen- 
sive and systematic; it was of great service in the Middle Ages, 
when it was used in an abridged form (sufficiently ancient, how- 
ever,) which we still possess. 

Antiquarian research was carried on during this period with 
much zeal. Many illustrious scholars are mentioned, none of 
whose works have come down to us, excej^t in extremely imper- 
fect abridgments. Fenestella (52 B.C.-22 a.d.) wrote on various 
legal and religious questions, on miscellaneous topics, as literary 
history, the art of good living, various points in natural history, 
&e. for which he is quoted as an authority by Pliny. His 
greatest work seems to have been Annales, which were used by 
Plutarch. It is probable, however, that in these he showed his special 
aptitude for archaeological research, and passed over the history 
in a rapid sketch. Special grammatical studies were carried on 
by Verrius Flaccus, a freedman, whose great work, De Verborum 
Slfpiijicatu, the first Latin lexicon conducted on an extensive 
scale, we possess in an abridgment by Festus. Its size may be 
conjectured from the fact that the letter A occupied four books, 
P five, and so on ; and that Festus's abridgment consisted of tv/enty 
large volumes.^ It was a rich storehouse of knowledge, the loss of 
which is much to be lamented. Another freedman, C. Julius 
Hyginus (64 B.C.-16 a.d.'?), who was also keeper of Augustus's 
library on the Palatine, manifested an activity scarcely less 
encyclopEedic than that of Yarro. Of his multifarious works we 
possess two short treatises which pass under his name, the first on 
mythology, called Fahulae, a series of extracts from his Genea- 
logiae, which we have in an abridgment; the second on astro- 
nomy, extending, though this is also in an abridged form, to four 
books. A few details of his life are given by Suetonius. He 
was a Spaniard by birth, though some believed him to be an 
Alexandrian, since Caesar brought him to Rome after the Alex- 
andrine War ; he attended at Rome the lectures of the grammarian 
Cornelius Alexander, surnamed Polyhistor. He was an intimate 
acquaintance of Ovid,^ and is said to have died in great poverty. 
It is doubtful whether the works we possess were written by him 
in his youth, or are the production of an imperfectly educated 
abbreviator. Bursian, quoted by Teufi'el,^ thinks it probable that 
in the second half of the second century of the Christian era, a 
grammarian made a very brief abridgment of Hyginus's work 
entitled Genealogiae, and to this added a treatise on the whole 

1 Ey)ist. ad Car. Magn, Praef. ad Paul. Diac. 

2 Tr. iii. 14, is perhaps addressed to him. 
8 § 257, 7. 



334 HISTOEY OF ROMAN LITERATUKE. 

mythology so far as it concerned poetical literature, compiled from 
good sources. This mythology, which retained the name of 
Hygmus and the title of Genealogiae, came to be generally used 
m the schools of the grammarians. 

The demand for school-books was now rapidly increasincr • and 
as the great classical authors pubhshed their works, an abundant 
supply ol material was given to the ingenious and learned The 
grammaticae tribus, whom Horace mentions mth such disdain i 
were already asserting their right to dispense Hterary fame. They 
were not as yet so compact or popular a body as the rhetoricians, 
but they had begun to cramp, as the others had begun to corrupt 
literatiire Dependence on the opinion of a clique is the most 
hiirtful state possible, even though the cHque be learned: and 
Horace showed wisdom as well as spirit in resisting it. The 
endeavour to please the leading men of the world, which Horace 
professed to be his object, is far less narromng; such men, thou-h 
literature'' ^^^'^''^ scientific merit, are the best judges of general 
The careful methods of exact inquiry, were, as we have said, 
directed also to law, m which Labeo remained the highest autho- 
rity. Oapito abated principle in favour of the imperial prero-a- 
tive. They did not, however, affect philosophy, which retained Its 
original colouring as an ars Vivendi. Many of Horace's friends 
as we learn from the Odes, gave their minds to speculative inquiry! 
but like the poet himself, they ^eem to have soon deserted it. 
At least we hear of no original investigations. Neither a meta- 
physic nor a psychology arose; only a loose rhetorical treatment 
ot physical questions, and a careful collection of ethical maxims 
tor^the most part eclectically obtained. 

Sextius Pythagoreus— there were two born of this name, 
la.her and son-wote in Greek, reproducing the oracular style 
of Herachtus The yvS^^^ac, which were translated and chris- 
tianised by Eufinus, were stamped mth a strongly the^stic 
character A few inferior thinkers are mentioned by Quin- 
tihan and Seiieca, as Papirius Fabianus, Sergius Flavius, 
and Plotius Crispinus. . Of these, Papirius treated some of tlie 
classihcatory sciences, which now first began to attract interest 
m Ixome Botany and zoology were the favourites. Minera- 
logy excited more interest on its commercial side with reoard 
to the vahie and history of jewels; it was also treated in a 
mystic or imaginative way. 

Prom this rapid summary it wiU be seen that real learning 

* Ep. i. 19, 40. 



SPECIMEN OF A SUASOEIAL DECLAMATION. 



335 



still flourislied in Eome. Despotism liad not crushed intellectnal 
energy, nor enforced silence on all but flatterers. The emperor 
had nevertheless grown suspicious in his old age, and given indica- 
tions of that tyranny which was soon to be the rule of govern- 
ment; he had interdicted Timagenes from his palace, banished 
Ovid, burnt the works of Labienus, exiled Severus, and shown such 
severity towards Albucius Silo that he anticipated further disgrace 
by a voluntary death. His reign closed in 14 a.d., and with it 
ceases for neax a century the appearance of the highest genius in 
Eome. 



APPENDIX. 



Note I. — A fragrtunt translated from Seneca's Siiasoriae, sTiovnng the style 
of expression cultivated in the schools. 



The subject (Suas. 2) debated is 
■whether the 300 Spartans at Ther- 
mopylae, seeing themselves deserted 
by the army, shall remain or flee. 
The different rhetors declaim as fol- 
lows, making Leonidas the speaker: — 

Arellius Fuscus. — AVhat ! are our 
picked ranks made up of raw recruits, 
or spirits likely to he cowed, or hands 
likely to shrink from the unaccus- | 
tomcd steel, or bodies enfeebled by ' 
wounds or decay ? How shall I speak ! 
of us as the flower of Greece ? Shall ■ 
I bestow that name on Spartans or ! 
Eleans ? or shall I rehearse the count- 
less battles of our ancestors, the cities 
they sacked, the nations they s])oiled ? 
and do men now dare to boast that ! 
our temples need no walls to guard j 
them ? Ashamed am I of our con- | 
du<.'t ; ashamed to have entertained 
even the idea of flight. But then, 
you say, Xerxes comes with an in- 
numerable host. Spartans ! and 
Spartans matched against barbarians, 
have you no reverence for your deeds, 
your grandsires, your sires, from 
whose example your souls from in- 
fancy gather lofty thoughts ? I scorn 
to otfer Spartans such exhortations 
as these. Look ! we are protected 
by our position. Though he bring 
with him the whole East, and parade 



his useless numbers before our craven 
eyes, this sea which spreads its vast 
expanse before us is pressed into a 
narrow compass, is beset by treacher- 
ous straits which scarce admit the 
passage of a single row-boat, and then 
by their chopyung swell make rowing 
iinpossible ; it is beset by unseen 
shallows, wedged between deeper 
bottoms, rough with sharp rocks, and 
everything that mocks the sailor's 
prayer. I am ashamed (I repeat it) 
that Spartans, and Spartans armed, 
should even stop to ask how it is they 
are safe. Shall I not carry hoTue the 
spoil of the Persians ? Then at least 
I will fall naked upon it. They 
shall know that we have yet tliree 
hundred men who thus scoi-n to flee, 
who thus mean to fall. Think of 
this: we can perhaps conquer ; with 
all our eff"ort we cannot be conquered. 
I do not say you are doomed to death 
— you to Avhom I address these words; 
but if you are, and yet think that 
death is be feared, you greatly err. 
To no living thing has nature given 
unending lile ; on the day of birth 
the day of death is fixed. For heaven 
has wrought us out of a weak ma- 
terial ; our bodies yield to the slight- 
est stroke, we are snatched away 
unwarned by fate. Childhood and 



336 



HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURK 



youth lie beneath the same inexor- 
able law. Most of us even long for 
death, so perfect a rest does it otter 
from the straggle of life. But glory- 
has no limits, and they who fall like 
us rise nearest to the gods. Even 
women often choose the path of death 
which leads to glory. What need to 
mention Lycurgus, those heroes 
handed down by history, whom no 
peril could appal ? to awake the spirit 
of Othrj^ades alone, would be to give 
example enough, and more than 
enough, for us three hundred men ! 

Triarius. — Are not Spartans a- 
shanied to be conquered, not by blows 
but by rumours ? 'Tis a great thing 
to be born a scion of valour and a 
Spartan. For certain victory all 
would wait; for certain death none 
but Spartans. Sparta is girt with no 
walls, her walls are uhere her men 
are. Better to call back the army 
than to follow tUem, What if the 
Persian bores through mountains, 
makes the sea invisible ? Such proud 
felicity never yet stood sure ; the 
loftiest exaltation is struck to earth 
through its forgetfulness of the in- 
stability of all things human. You 
may be sure that power which has 
given rise to envy has not seen its 
last phase. It has changed seas, 
lands, nature itself; let us three 
hundred die, if only that it may here 
find something it cannot change. If 
such madmen's counsel was to be 
accepted, why did we not flee with 
the crowd ? 

Porcius Latro. — This then is what 
we have waited for, to collect a band 
of runaways. You flee from a ru- 
mour ; let us at least know of what 
sort it is. Our dishonour can hardly 
be wiped out even by victory ; brave- 
ly as we may tight, successful as we 
may be, much of our renown is al- 
ready lost ; for Spartans have debated 
whether or not to flee. that we 
may die ! For myself, after this dis- 
cussion, the only thing I fear is to re- 
turn home. Old women's tales have 
shaken the arms out of our hands. 
Now, now, let us fight, among the 



thirty thousand our valour might 
have lain hid. The rest have fled. 
If you ask my opinion, which I utter 
for the honour of ourselves and Greece, 
I say they have not deserted us, they 
have chosen us as their champions. 

Marillus.— l^h.\s was our reason fur 
remaining, that we might not be 
hidden among the crowd of fugitives. 
The army has a good excuse to off'er 
for its conduct: "We knew Ther- 
mopylae would be safe since we left 
Spartans to guard it." 

Cestius Pius. — You have shown, 
Spartans, how base it were to fly by 
so long remaining still. All have 
their privilege. The glory of Athens 
is speech, of Thebes religion, ofSp^irta 
arms. 'Tis for this Eurotas flows 
round our state that its stream may 
inure our boys to the hardships of 
future war ; 'tis for this we have our 
peaks of Taygetus inaccessible but to 
S[)artans ; 'tis for this we boast of a 
Hercules who has won heaven by 
merit ; 'tis for this that arms are our 
only walls. deep disgrace to our 
ancestral valour ! Spartans are 
counting their numbers, not their 
manhood. Let us see how long the 
list is, that Sparta may have, if not 
brave soldiers, at lenst true mes- 
sengers. Can it be that we are van* 
quished, not by war, but by reports ? 
that man, i' faith, has a right to 
despise everything at whose very 
name Spartans are afraid. If we 
may not conquer Xerxes, let us at 
least be allowed to see him ; I would 
know what it is 1 flee from. As yet 
I am in no way like an Athenian, 
either in seeking culture, or in dwel- 
ling behind a wall ; the last Athenian 
quality that I shall imitate will be 
cowardice, 

Pompeius Silo. — XerxesJeads many 
with him, Thermopylae can hold but 
few. We shall be the most timid of 
the brave, the slowest of cowards. 
No matter how great nations the 
East has poured into our hiMuisphere, 
how many peoples Xerxes brings with 
him ; as many as this place will hold, 
with those is our concerik 



APPENDIX. 



337 



Cornelius Eispanus. — "We have 
come for Sparta; let us stay for 
Greece ; let us vanquish the foe as we 
have already vanquished our friends ; 
let this arrogant barbarian learn that 
nothing is so difficult as to cut an 
armed Spartan down. For my part, 
I am glad the rest have gone ; they 
have left Thermopylae for us ; there 
will now be nothing to mingle or com- 
pare itself with our valour; no 
Spartan will be hidden in the crowd ; 
wherever Xerxes looks he will see 
none but Spartans. 

BlandiLs. — Shall I remind you of 
your mother's command — '* Either 
with your shield or on it ? " and yet 
to return without arms is far less base 
than to flee under arms. Shall I 
remind you of the words of the cap- 
tive ? — "Kill me, I am no slave!" 
To such a man to escape would not 
have been to avoid capture. Describe 
tiie Persian terrors! We heard all that 
when we were first sent out. Let 
Xerxes see the three hundred, and 
learn at what rate the war is valued, 
what number of men the place is 
calculated to hold. We will not 
return even as messengers except 
ifter the fight is over. Who has fied 



I know not ; these men Sparta has 
given me for comrades. I am thank- 
ful that the host has fled ; they had 
made the pass of Thermopylae too 
narrow for me to move in. 

§ On the other side. 

Cornelius Ilispanus. — I hold it a 
great disgrace to our state if Xerxes 
see no Greeks before he sees the 
Spartans. We shall not even have 
a witness of our valour ; the enemy's 
account of us will be believed. You 
have my counsel, it is the same as 
that of all Greece. If any one advise 
differently, he wishes you to be not 
brave men but ruined men. 

Clavdius Marcellxis. — They will 
not conquer us ; they will overwhelm 
us. Wc have been true to our re- 
nown, we have waited till the last. 
Nature herself has yielded before we. 

The above Suasoria is by no means 
one of the most brilliant ; on the 
contrar}'", it is a decidedly a tame one, 
but it is a good instance of an ordi- 
nary declamation of the better sort, 
and gives passages from most of the 
rhetoricians to whom reference is 
made in the text. 



Note II. — A few Observations on the 
taken from the Third 

"The division of the departments of 
rhetoric, or to use a more correct term, 
the classification of causes, is three- 
fold : They are either laudatory, de- 
liberative, or judicial. This is a di- 
vision according to the subject matter, 
not according to the artistic treat- 
ment. Correspondingly, there are 
three requisites for pleading well, 
nature, art, and practice; and three 
objects which the orator must set be- 
fore hjm, to teach, to move, and to 
delight. Every question turns either 
on things or on words; or as it may 
be expressed in other language, is 
either indefinite or definite. The 
indefinite is in the form of a universal 
proposition (Oeais) which Cicero calls 
pj'cpositum. others quaesiio unive7'salis 
civilis, oth.eis quaestio ;philosopho con- 



Treatment of Rhetorical Questions, 
Book of Quintilian. 

veniens, and Athenaeus pars causae. 
This again is divided under the heads 
of knowledge and action respectively ; 
of knowledge, e.g. Is the world ruled 
by Providence? of action, e.g.. Is politi- 
cal activity a duty? The definite 
question regards things, persons, 
times, circumstances : it is called 
viroQecis in Greek, causa in Latin. 
It always depends on an indelinite 
question, e.g.. Ought Cato to marry "i 
depends on the wider one. Is mar- 
riage desirable? Hence it may be a 
suo-soria. And this is true even of 
cases in which no person is specially 
mentioned, e.g., the question, Ought a 
man to hold office under a tyranny ? 
depends on the wider one. Ought a 
man to hold office at all? And this 
question refers of necessity \o some 



338 



HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 



special tyrant, thongli it may not 
mention him by name. This is the 
same division as that into general and 
special questions. Thus every special 
includes a general. It is true that 
generals often bear only remotely on 
practice, and sometimes are altogether 
neutralised by peculiar circumstances, 
e.g., the question, 7s political activity 
a duty .? becomes inapplicable to a 
chronic invalid. Still, all are not of 
this kind, e.g., Is virtue the end of 
■man 1 is equally applicable to every 
human being, whatever his capacity. 
Cicero in his earlier treatises disap- 
proved of these questions being dis- 
cussed by the orator ; he wished to 
leave them to the philosopher ; but 
as he grew in experience he changed 
his mind. 

"A cause is defined by Valgius, 
after Apol lodorus, as negotium omnibus 
suis partibus svectans ad quaestionem, 
or as negotium cuius finis est conti-over- 
sia. The negotium (or business in 
hand) is thus defined, congy-egatio j^er- 
sonarum loccncm temporum causa- 
rum onodorum casuum Jactorum in- 
strumentorum sermonum scrijjtorum 
et own scrip)torum. The cause, there- 
fore, corresponds to the Greek viro- 
araaris (subject), the negotium to 
Trepio-Too-is (surroundings). These are 
of course closely connected; and many 
have defined the cause as though it 
were identical with its surroundings or 
conditions. 

"In every discussion three things are 
the objects of inquiry, an sit, Is it so ? 
quid sit, If so, what is it ? quale sit, 
of what kind is it ? For first, there 
must be something, about which the 
discussion has arisen. Till this is 
made clear no discussion as to what 
it is can arise ; far less can we deter- 
mine what its qualities are, until this 
second point is ascertained. These 
three objects of inquiry are exhaus- 



tive; on them every question, whether 
definite or indefinite, depends. The 
accuser will try to establish, first, the 
occurrence of the act in dispute, then 
its character ; and, lastly, its crimin- 
ality. The advocate will, if possible, 
deny the fact; if he cannot do that 
he will prove that it is not what the 
accuser states it to be ; or, thirdly, 
he may contend — and this is the most 
honourable kind of defence— that it 
was rightly done. As a fourth alter- 
native, he may take exception to the 
legality of the prosecution. All these, 
and every other conceivable division 
of questions, come under the two 
general heads (status) of rational and 
legal. The rational is simple enough, 
depending only on the contemplation 
of nature ; thus it is content with ex- 
hibiting conjecture, definition, and 
quality. The legal i^extremely com- 
plex, laws being infinite in number 
and character. Sometimes the letter 
is to be observed, sometimes the spirit. 
Sometimes we get at its meaning by 
comparison, or induction ; sometimes 
its meaning is open to the most con- 
tradictory interpretations. Hence 
there is room for a far greater display 
of diverse kinds of excellence in the 
legal than in the rational department. 
Thus the declamatoiy exercises called 
suasoriae, which are confined to ra- 
tional considerations, are fittest for 
young students whose reasoning 
powers are acute, but who have not 
the knowledge of law necessary for 
enabling them to treat controversiae 
which hinge on legal questions. 
These last are intended as a prepara- 
tion for the pleading of actual causes 
in curt, and should be regularly 
practised even by the most accom- 
plished pleader during the spare 
moments that Ms profession allows 
him." 



BOOK III. 
THE DECLINE. 

FSOM TEE ACCESSION OF TIBERIUS TO THE DEATH 
OF M. AUBELIUS (14-180 A.D.) 



BOOK III 



CHAPTEE L 

The Age op Tiberius (14-37 a.d.). 

Augustus was not more tmlike his gloomy successor than were 
the writers who flourished under him to those that now come 
before us. The history of literature presents no stronger contrast 
than between the rich fertility of the last epoch and the barrenness of 
the present one. The age of Tiberius forms an interval of silence 
duriQg which the dead are buried, and the new generation prepares 
^tseK to appear. Under Nero it will have started forth in aU iis 
panoply of tinsel armour; at present the seeds that will produce it 
are being sown by the hand of despotism. ^ 

The sudden collapse of letters on the death of Augustus is 
easily accounted for. As long as the chief of the state encouraged 
them labourers in every field were numerous. When his face was 
withdrawn the stimulus to effort was removed. Thus, even in 
Augustus's time, when ill health and disappointment had soured 
his nature and disposed him to arbitrary actions, literature had 
felt the change. The exile of Ovid was a blow to the muses. We 
have seen how it injured his own genius, a decline over which he 
mourns, knowing the cause but impotent to overcome it.^ We 
have seen also how it was followed up by other harsh measures, 
gtifling the free voice of poets and historians. And when we 
reflect how the despotism w%^ entAvining itself round the entire 

' The Empire is here regarded solely m its influence on literature and the 
classes that monopolised it. If the poor or the provincials had written its 
history it would have heen described in very different terms. 

'^ Pont. iv. 2, Impetus ille sacer, qui vatum pectora nutrit Qui prius in 
nobis esse solebat abest. Vix venit ad partes ; vix sumtae Musa tabellae 
Iniponit pigras paene coacta manus. 



342 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

life of the nation, gathering by each new enactment food for 
future aggression, and only veiled as yet by the mildness or 
caution of a prince whose one object was to found a dynasty, our 
surprise is lessened at the spectacle of literature prostrate and 
dumb, threatened by the liideous form of tyranny now no longer 
in disguise, offering it with brutal irony the choice between sub- 
mission, hypocrisy, and death. Tiberius (whose portrait drawn 
by Tacitus in colours almost too dark for belief, is nevertheless 
rendered credible by the deatlilike silence in which his reign was 
passed) had in his youth shown both taste and proficiency in 
libeml studies. He had formed his style on that of Messala, but 
the gloomy bent of his mind led him to contract and obscure his 
meaning to such a degree that, unlike most Eomans, he spoke 
better extempore^ than after preparation. In the art of perplexing 
by ambiguous phrases, of indicating intentions without committing 
himself to them, he was without a rival In point of language he 
was a purist like Augustus; but unlike him he mingled archaisms 
with his diction. While at Ehodes he attended the lectures of 
Theodorus; and the letters or speeches of his referred to by Tacitus 
indicate a nervous and concentrated style. Poetry was alien from 
Ms stern character. Nevertheless, Suetonius tells us he wrote a 
lyric poem and Greek imitations of Euphorion, Rhianus, and 
Parthenius; but it was the minute questions of mythology that 
chiefly attracted him, points of useless erudition like those derided 
by Juvenal r^ 

** Nutricem Anchisae, nomen patriamque novercae 
Aiicheraoli, dicat quot Acestes vixerit annos, 
Quot Siculus Phry gibus viui donaverit urnas." 

In maturer life he busied himself with writing memoirs, which 
formed the chief, almost the only study of Domitian, and of which 
we may regret that time has deprived us. The portrait of this 
arch dissembler by his own able hand would be a good set off to 
the terrible indictment of Tacitus. Besides the above he was the 
author of funeral speeches, and, according to Suidas, of a work on 
the art of rhetoric. 

With these literary pretensions it is clear that his discourage- 
ment of letters as emperor was due to political reasons. He saw 
in the free expression of thought or fancy a danger to his throne. 
And as the abominable system of delations made every chance 
expression penal, and found treason to the present in all praise of 
the past, the only resource open to men of letters was to suppress 
every expression of feeling, and, by silent brooding, to keep 

- Suet. Tib. 70. 2 Sat. vii. 234 



I 



GREAT DEPRESSION OF LITERATURE. 343 



passion at white heat, so that when it speaks at last it speaks 
with the concentrated intensity of a Juvenal or a Tacitus. 

We might ask how it was that authors did not choose subjects 
outside the sphere of danger. There were still forms of art and 
science which had not been worked out. The Natural History of 
Pliny shows how much remained to be done in fields of great 
interest. Neither philosophy nor the lighter kinds of poetry could 
afford matter for provocation. Eut the answer is easy. The Eoman 
imagination was so narrow, and their constructive talent so 
restricted, that they felt no desire to travel beyond the regular 
lines. It seemed as if all had been done that could be done well. 
History, national and universal,^ science^ and philosophy,^ Greek 
poetry in all its varied forms, had been brought to perfection by 
great masters whom it was hopeless to rival. The age of literary 
production seemed to have been rounded off, and the self -conscious- 
ness that could reflect on the new era had not yet had time to 
arise. Ehetoric, as apphed to the expression of political feeling, 
was the only form which literature cared to take, and that was 
precisely the form most obnoxious to the government. 

Thus it is possible that even had Tiberius been less jealously 
repressive letters would still have stagnated. The severe strain of 
the Augustan age brought its inevitable reaction. The simulta- 
neous appearance of so many writers of the first rank rendered 
necessary an interval during which their works were being digested 
and their spirit settling down into an integral constituent of the 
national mind. By the time thought reawakens, Yii^gil, Horace, 
and Livy, are already household words, and their works the basis 
of all hterary culture. 

In reading the lives of the chief post- Augustan writers we are 
struck by the fact that many, if not most of them, held offices of 
state. The desire for peaceful retirement, characteristic of the 
early Augustans, the contentment with lettered leisure that sig- 
nalises the poetry of the later Augustans, have both given place to 
a restless excitement, and to a determination to make the most of 
literature as an aid to a successful career. Hitherto we have 
observed two distinct classes of writers, and a corresponding double 
relation of politics and literature. The early poets, and again 
those of Augustus's era, were not men of afiairs, they belonged to 
the exclusively hterary class. The great prose ^vriters on the 
contrary rose to political eminence by political conduct. Litera- 
ture was with them a relaxation, and served no purpose of worldly 
aggrandisement. l!^ow, however, an unhealthy confusion between 

^ Livj? and Trogus. ^ Yarro. 3 Cicero. 



344 



HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 



the two provinces takes place. A man rises to office througli his 
poems or rhetorical essays. The acquirements of a professor 
become a passport to public life. Seneca and Quintilian are 
striking and favourable instances of the school door opening into 
the senate ; 

** Si fortuna volet fies de rhetore consul." ^ 

But nearly all the chief writers carried their declamatory prin- 
ciples into the serious business of life. This double aspect of 
their career produced two different types of talent, under one or 
other of which the great imperial writers may be ranged. Ex- 
cluding men of the second rank, we have on the one side Lucan, 
Juvenal, and Tacitus, all whose minds have a strong political bias, 
the bias of old Rome, w^hich makes them the most powerful 
though the most prejudiced exponents of their times. Of another 
kind are Persius, Seneca, and Pliny the elder. Their genius is 
contemplative and philosophical ; and though two of them were 
much mixed in affairs, their spirit is cosmopolitan rather than 
national, and their wisdom, though drawn from varied sources, 
cannot be called political. These six are the representative minds 
of the period on which we are now entering, and between them 
reflect nearly all the best and worst features of their age. Quin- 
tihan, Statins, and Pliny the younger, represent a more restricted 
development ; the first of them is the typical rhetorician, but of 
the better class; the second is the brilliant improvisatore and 
ingenious word-painter ; the third the cultivated and amiable but 
vain, common-place, and dwarfed type of genius which under the 
Empire took the place of the "fine gentlemen" of the free 
Eepublic. 

Writers of this last stamp cannot be expected to show any 
independent spirit. They are such as in every age would adopt 
the prevalent fashion, and theorise within the hmits prescribed by 
respectability. While a bad emperor reigns they flatter him; 
when a good emperor succeeds they flatter him still more by 
abusing his predecessor ; at the same time they are genial, sober, 
and sensible, adventuring neither the safety of their necks nor of 
their intellectual reputation. 

Such an author comes before us in M. Velleius Paterculus, 
the court historian of Tiberius. This well-intentioned but loqua- 
cious writer gained his loyalty from an experience of eight years' 
warfare under Tiberius in various parts of Europe, and the flattery 
of which he is so lavish was probably sincere. His birth may 
perhaps be referred to 18 B.C., since his fu'st campaign, under 

^ Juv. vii. 197. 



VELLEIUS PATERCULUS. 345 

M. Vinicius, to whose son lie dedicated Ms work, took place in 
the year 1 b.c. Tiberius's sterling qualities as a soldier gained him 
the friendship of many of his legati, and Yelieius was fortunate 
enough to secure that of Tiberius in return. By his influence he 
rose through the minor offices to the praetorship (14 a.d.), and 
soon after set himself to repair the deficiencies of a purely mihtary 
education by systematic study. The fruit of this labour is the 
Abridgment of Roman History, in two books, a mere rapid survey 
of the early period, becoming more diff'use as it nears his own 
time, and treating the life of Tiberius and the events of which he 
was the centre with considerable fulness. The latter part is pre- 
served entire ; of the first book, which closes with the destruction 
of Carthage, a considerable portion has been lost. As, however, 
he is not likely to have followed in it any authorities inaccessible 
to us, the loss is unimportant. For his work generally the 
authorities he quotes are good — Cato's Origines, the Annates of 
Hortensius, and probably Atticus's abridgment ; Cornelius ^N'epos, 
and Trogus for foreign, Livy and Sallust (of whom he was a great 
admirer) for national, history. As a recipient and expectant of 
court favour, he naturally echoed the language of the day. Brutus 
and Cassius are for him parricides ; Caesar, the divine founder of 
an era which culminates in the divine Tiberius.^ So full was he 
of his master's praises that he intended to write a separate book 
on the sub'.ct, but was prevented by his untimely death. This 
took place in 31 a.d., when the discovery of Sejanus's conspiracy 
caused many suspected to be put to death, and it seems that 
Yelleius was among the number. 

His blind partisanship naturally obscures his judgment ; but, 
making allowance for a defect which he does not attempt to 
conceal, the reader may generally trust him for all matters of fact. 
His studies were not as a rule deep ; but an exception must be 
made in the case of his account of the Greek colonies in Italy, the 
dates at which they were founded, and their early relations T\dth 
Eome. These had never been so clearly treated by any writer, 
at least among those with whom we are famUiar. His mind is 
not of a high order ; he can neither sift evidence nor penetrate to 
causes ; his talents lie in the biographical department, and he has 
considerable insight into character. His style is not unclassical 
so far as the vocabulary goes, but the equable moderation of the 
Golden Age is replaced by exaggeration, and hke all who cultivate 
artificial brilliancy, he cannot maintain his ambitious level of 
poetical and pretentious ornament. The last year referred to in 

* See ii. 94 which contains exaggerated commendations on Tiberius. 



346 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

the book is 30 a.d. The dearth of other material gives him 
additional value. As a historian he takes a low rank; as an 
abridger he is better, but best of all as a rhetorical anecdotist and 
painter of character in action. 

A better known writer (especially during the Middle Ages) is 
Valerius JVIaximus, author of the Facta et Dida Meihorahilia , in 
nine books, addressed to Tiberius in a dedication of unexampled 
servility,^ and compiled from few though good sources. The 
object of the work is stated in the preface. It was to save labour 
for those who desired to fortify their minds with examples of 
excellence, or increase their knowledge of things worth knowing. 
The methodical arrangement by subjects, e.g., rehgion, which is 
divided into religion observed and religion neglected, and instances 
of both given, first from Eoman, then from foreign, history, and so 
on with all the other subjects, makes Teuffel's suggestion extremely 
probable, namely, that it was intended for the use of young 
declaimers, who were thus furnished with instances for all sorts 
of themes. The constant tendency in the imperial literature to 
exhaust a subject by a catalogue of every known instance may be 
traced to these pernicious rhetorical handbooks. If a ^vriter 
praises temperance, he supplements it by a list of temperate 
Eomans ; if he describes a storm, h.Qputs doion all he knows about 
the Avuids. Uncritical as Valerius is, and void of all thought, he 
is nevertheless pleasant enough reading for a vacant hour, and if 
we were not obliged to rate him by a lofty standard, would pass 
muster very welL But he is no fit company for men of genius ; 
our only wonder is he should have so long survived. His work 
was a favourite school-book for junior classes, and was epitomisea 
or abridged by Juhus Paris in the fourth or fifth century. At 
the time of this abridgment the so-called tenth book must have 
been added. Julius Paris's words in his preface to it are, Liher 
decimus de praenominihus et similibus: but various considerations 
make it certain that Valerius was not the author. ^ Many inter- 
esting details were given in it, taken chiefly from Varro ; and it 
is much to be regretted that the entire treatise is not preserved. 
Besides Paris one Titius Probus retouched the work in a still later 
age, and a third abstract by Januarius I^epotianus is mentioned. 
This last writer cut out aU the padding which Valerius had so 

^ The author's humble estimate of himself appears, Si prisci oratores ab 
Jove Opt. J\lax. bene oisi sunt . . . mea parvitas eo iustius ad tuurn favorem 
decurrerit, quod cetera divinitas opinione eolligitur, tua praesenti fide 
paterno avitoque sideri par vldetur . . . Deos reliquos accepimus, Caesares 
dedimus. 



CELSUS. 347 

largely used (" dum se ostentat sententiis, Ions iadat, fundit exces- 
sibus "), and reduced the work to a bare skeleton of facts. 

A much, more important writer, one of whose treatises only has 
reached us, was A. Cornelius Celsus. He stood in the first 
rank of Roman scientists, was quite encyclopaedic in his learning, 
and wrote, like Cato, on eloquence, law, farming, medicine, and 
tactics. There is no doubt that the w^ork on medicine (extending 
over Books VI. -XIII. of his Encyclopaedia) wliich we possess, 
was the best of his writings, but the chapters on agriculture also 
are higlily praised by Columella. 

At this time, as Des Etangs remarks, nearly all the knowledge 
and practice of medicine was in the hands of Greek physicians, 
and these either freedmen or slaves. Eoman practitioners seem 
to have inspired less confidence even when they were willing to 
study. Habits of scientific observation are hereditary; and for 
centuries the Greeks had studied the conditions of health and the 
theory of disease, as well as practised the empirical side of the art, 
and most Eomans were well content to leave the whole in their 
hands. 

Celsus tried to attract his countrymen to the pursuit of medicine 
by pointing out its value and dignity. He commences his work 
with a history of medical science since its first importation into 
Greece, and devotes the rest of Book I. to a consideration oi die- 
tetics and other prophylactics of disease ; the second book treats of 
general pathology, the third and foiu'th of special illnesses, the fifth 
gives remedies and prescriptions, the sixth, seventh, and eighth — 
the most valuable part of the book — apply themselves chiefly to 
surgical questions. The value of his work consists in the clear, 
comprehensive grasp of his subject, and the systematic way in which 
he expounds its principles. The main points of his theory are 
still valid; very few essentials need to be rejected; it might still 
be taken as a popular handbook on the subject. He writes for 
Eoman citizens, and is therefore careful to avoid abstruse terms 
where plain ones will do, and Greek words where Latin are to be 
had. The style is bare, but pure and classical. An excellent 
critic says^ — " Quo saepius eum perlegebam, eo magis me detinuit 
cum dicendi nitor et brevitas tum perspicacitas iudicii sensusque 
vcrax et ad agendum accommodatus, quibus omnibus genuinam 
repraesentat nobis civis Eomani imaginem." The text as we 
Lave it depends on a single MS. and sadly needs a careful 
revision ; it is interpolated with numerous glosses, both Greek and 
Latin, which a skilful editor would detect and remove. Among 

1 Daremberg. 



3-48 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

the other treatises in his Encyclopaedia, next to that on farming, 
those on rhetoric and tactics were most popular. The former, how- 
ever, was superseded by Quintilian, the latter by Vegetius. In 
philosophy he did not so much criticise other schools as detail his 
own views with concise eloquence. These views were almost 
certainly Eclectic, though we know on Quintilian's authority that 
he followed the two Sextii in many important points. ^ 

The other branches of prose composition were almost neglected 
in this reign. Even rhetoric sank to a low level ; the splendid 
displays of men like Latro, Arellius, and Ovid gave place to the 
flimsy ostentation of Eemmius Palaemon. This dissolute man, 
who combined the professions of grammarian and rhetorician, 
possessed an extraordinary aptitude for fluent harangue, but 
soon confined his attention to grammatical studies, in which he 
rose to the position of an authority. Suetonius says he was born 
a slave, and that while conducting his young master to school he 
learnt something of hterature, was liberated, and set up a school 
in Eome, where he rose to the top of his profession. Although 
infamous for his abandoned profligacy, and stigmatized by Tiberius 
and Claudius as utterly unfit to have charge of the young, he 
managed to secure a very large number of pupils by his persuasive 
manner, and the excellence of his tutorial method. His memory 
was prodigious, his eloquence seductive, and a power of extempore 
versification in the most difficult metres enhanced the charm of 
his conversation. He is referred to by PHny, Quintilian, and 
Juvenal, and for a time superintended the studies of the young 
satirist JPersius. 

Oratory, as may easily be supposed, had well nigh ceased. 

VOTIBNUS MONTANUS, MaMERCUS ScAURUS, and P. YiTELLIUS, all 

held high positions in the state. Scaurus, in particular, was also 
of noble lineage, being the great-grandson of the celebrated chief 
of the senate. His oratory was almost confined to declamation, 
but was far above the general level of the time. Careless, and 
often full of faults, it yet carried his hearers away by its native 
power and dignity. ^ Asinius Gallds, the son of Pollio, so far 
followed his father as to take a strong interest in politics, and Avith 
filial enthusiasm compared him favourably with Cicero. Domitius 
Afer also is mentioned by Tacitus as an able but dissolute man,- 
who under a better system might have been a good speaker. 

1 Notices of Celsns are — on his Husbandry, Quint. XII. xi. 24, Colum, I. 
i. 14 ; on Ms Rhetoric, Quint IX. i. 18, et sacp ; on his Philosophy, Quint. 
X. i. 124; on his Tactics, Yeget. i. 8. Celsus died in the time of Nero, 
under whom he wrote one or two political works. 

2 See Sen. Contr. Praef. X. 2-4. 



PHAEDRUS. 349 

A writer of some mark was Cremutius Cordus, wliose eloquent 
account of the rise of the Empire cost him his hfe : in direct 
defiance of the fasionable cant of the day he had called Cassius 
"the last of the Eomans." The higher spirits seemed to take a 
gloomy pleasure in speaking out before the tyrant, even if it were 
only with their last breath ; more than one striking instance of 
this is recorded by Tacitus ; and though he questions the wisdom 
of reheving personal indignation by a vain invective, which must 
bring death and ruin on the speaker and all his family, and in 
the end only tighten the yoke it tries to shake, yet the intract- 
able pride of these representatives of the old families has some- 
thing about it to which, human as we are, we cannot refuse our 
sympathy. The only other prose-writer we need mention is 
AuFiDius Bassus, who described the Civil Wars and the German 
expeditions, and is mentioned with great respect by Tacitus. 

Poetry is represented by the fifth book of Manilius, by 
Phaedrus's Fables, and perhaps by the translation of Aratus 
ascribed to Germanicus, the nephew and adopted son of Tiberius. 
This translation, which is both elegant and faithful, and superior 
to Cicero's in poetical inspiration, has been claimed, but with less 
probability, for Domitian, who, as is well known, affected the title 
of Germanicus.^ But the consent of the most ancient critics tends 
to restore Germanicus Drusus as the author, the title genitor 
applied to Tiberius not being proof positive the other way. 

The only writer who mentions Phaedrus is Martial, ^ and he 
only in a single passage. The Aesopian beast-fable was a humble 
form of art peculiarly suited to a period of political and literary 
depression. Seneca in his Consolatio ad Polyhium implies that 
that imperial favourite had cultivated it with success. Apparently 
he did not know of Phaedrus; and this fact agrees with the 
frequent complaints that Phaedrus makes to the effect that he is 
not appreciated. Of his life we know only what Ave can gather 
from his own book. He was born in Pieria, and became the slave 
of Augustus, who set him free, and seems to have given him his 
patronage. The poet was proud of his Greek birth, but was 
brought to Eome at so early an age as to belong almost equally to 
both nationalities. His poverty^ did not secure him from persecu- 
tion. Sejanus, ever suspicious and watchful, detected the 
political allusions veiled beneath the disguise of fable, and made 
the poet feel his anger. The duration of Phaedrus's career is 
uncertain. The first tivo books were all that he published in 
Tiberius's reign ; the third, dedicated to Eutychus, and the fourth 

^ Quint. X. i. 91. ^ J.Tart. III. 20, Aemidatur ionprobi iocos Phacdri. 
8 Phaed. III. prol 21. 



350 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

to Particulo, Claudius's favourite, clearly show that lie continued to 
write over a considerable time. Tlie date of Book V. is not 
mentioned, but it can hardly be earlier than the close of Claudius's 
reign. Thus we have a period of nearly thirty years during 
which these five short books were produced. 

Like all who con over their oivn compositions, Phaedrus had an 
unreasonably high opinion of their merit. Literary reputation 
was his chief desire, and he thought himself secure of it. He 
echoes the boast so many greater men have made before him, 
that he is the first to import a form of Greek art; but he 
Hniits his imitation to the general scope, reserving to himself the 
right to vary the particular form in each fable as he thinks fit.^ 
The careful way in which he defines at what point his obligations 
to Aesop cease and his own invention begins, shows him to have 
had something of the trifler and a great deal of the egotist. His 
love of condensation is natural, for a fabuhst should be short, 
trenchant, and almost proverbial in his style ; but Phaedrus carries 
these to the point of obscurity and enigma. It seems as if at 
times he did not see his drift himself. To this fault is akin the 
constant moralising tone which reflects rather than paints, enforces 
rather than elicits its lesson. He is himself a small sage, and all his 
animals are small sages too. They have not the life-like reality of 
those of Aesop ; they are mere lay figures. His technical skill is 
very considerable ; the iambic senarius becomes in his hands an 
extremely pleasing rhythm, though the occurrence of spondees in 
the second and fourth place savours of archaic usage. His diction 
is hardly varied enough to admit of clear reference to a standard, 
but on the whole it may be pronounced nearer to the silver than 
the golden Latinity, especially in the frequent use of abstract 
words. His confident predictions of immortality were nearly 
being falsified by the burning, by certain zealots, of an abbey in 
France, where alone the MS. existed (1561 a.d.) ; but Phaedrus, 
in common with many others^ was rescued from the worthy 
Calvinists, and has since held a quiet corner to himself in the 
temple of fame. 

A poet whose misfortunes were of service to his talent, was 
PoMPONius Secundus. His friendsliip with Aelius Gallus, son to 
Sejanus, caused him to be imprisoned durmg several years. While 
in this condition he devoted himself to literature, and ^^rrote many 
tragedies wliich are spoken well of by Quintilian : " Eorimi 
(tragic poets) quos viderim longe princeps Pomponius Secundus. "^ 
He was an acute rhetorician, and a purist in language. The 

^ Phaed. IV. prol. 11 ; he carefully defines his fables as Aesopiae, not Aesopi. 
2 Quiut. X. i 95. 



POMPOXIUS SECUNDUS. 351 

extant names of his plays are Aeneas^ and perhaps Armorum 
Judicmm and Atreus, but these last two are uncertain. Tragedy 
was much cultivated during the imperial times ; for it formed an 
outlet for feeling not otherwise safe to express, and it admitted all 
the ornaments of rhetoric. Those who regard the tragedies of 
Seneca as the work of the father, would refer them to this reign, 
to the end of which the old man's acti\'ity lasted, though his 
energies were more taken up with Avatching and guiding the careers 
of his children than with original composition. When Tiberius 
died (37 a.d.) literature could hardly have been at a lower ebb ; 
but even then there were young men forming their minds and 
imbibing new canons of taste, who were destined before long — 
for almost all \vrote early — to redeem the age from the charge 
of dulness, perhaps at too great a sacrilica 



I 



CHAPTEE IL 

The Eeigns of Caligula, Claudius, and ^JTero (37-68 a.d.). 
1. Poets. 

We liave grouped these three emperors under a single heading 
because the shortness of the reigns of the two former prevented 
the formation of any special school of literature. It is otherwise 
with the reign of Nero. To this belongs a constellation of some of 
the most brilliant authors that Eome ever produced. And they 
are characterised by some very special traits. Instead of the 
depression we noticed under Tiberius we now observe a forced 
vivacity and sprightliness, even in dealing with the most awful 
or serious subjects, wliich is unlike anything we have hitherto met 
with in Eoman literature. It is quite different from the natural , 
gaiety of Catullus ; equally so from the witty frivolity of Ovid. 
It is not in the least meant to be frivolous ; on the contrary i1 
arises from an overstrained earnestness, and a desire to say every- 
thing in the most pointed and emphatic form in which it can be 
said. To whatever school the waiters belong, this characteristic is 
always present. Persius shows it as much as Seneca; the his- 
torians as much as the rhetors. The only one who is not imbued 
with it is the professed wit Petronius. Probably he had exhausted 
it in conversation ; perhaps he disapproved of it as a corrupt im- 
portation of the Senecas. 

The emperors themselves were all literati. Caligula, it is tnTe, 
did not publish, but he gave great attention to eloquence, and was 
even more vigorous as an extempore speaker than as a writer. 
His mental derangement affected his criticism. He thought at one 
time of burning all the copies of Homer that could be got at ; at 
an jther of removing all the statues of Livy and Virgil, the one as 
unlearned and uncritical, the other as verbose and negligent. Que 
is puzzled to know to which respectively these criticisms refer. 
We do not venture to assign them, but translate literally from 
feuetonius.^ 

Claudius had a brain as sluggish as Caligula's was over-excitable ; 
1 Cal. 34. 



NERO'S POETRY. 353 

nevertlieless lie prosecuted literature with care, and published 
several worts. Among these was a history, beginning with the 
death of Julius Caesar, in forty-three Yolumes,^ an autobiography 
in eight,2 "magis inepte quam inelegantsr scriptum;" a learned 
defence of Cicero against Asinius Callus's invective, besides several 
Greek writings. His philological studies and the innovations he 
tried to introduce have been referred to in a former chapter.^ 

Nero, while a young man before his accession, tried his powers 
in nearly every department of letters. He approached philosophy, 
but his prudent mother deterred him from a study which might 
lead him to views "above his station as a prince." He next 
turned to the old orators, but here his preceptor Seneca intervened, 
Tacitus insinuates, with the motive of turning him from the best 
models to an admiration of his own more seductive style. I^Tero 
declaimed freque^^tly in public, and his poetical effusions seem to 
have possessed some real merit. At the first celebration of the 
festival called Neroniana he was crowned with the wreath of 
victory. His most celebrated poem, the one that drew down on 
him the irony of Juvenal, was the Troic% in which perhaps 
occurred the Troiae Halosis which this madman recited in state 
over the burning ruins of Eome, and which is parodied with subtle 
mockery in Petronius. Other poems were of a lighter cast and 
intended to be sung to the accompaniment of the harp. These 
were the crowning scandal of his imperial vagaries in the eyes of 
patriotic Eomans. " With our prince a fiddler," cries Juvenal, 
"what further disgrace remains?" King Lewis of Eavaria and 
some other great personages of our era would perhaps object to 
Juvenal's conclusion. With all these accomplishments, however, 
Kero either could not or would not speak. He had not the vigour 
of mind necessary for eloquence. Hence he usually employed 
Seneca to dress up speeches for him, a task which that polite 
minister was not sorry to undertake. 

The earliest poet who comes before us is the unknown author of 
the panegyric on Calpurhius Piso. It is an elegant piece of ver- 
sification with no particular merit or demerit. It takes pains to 
justify Piso for flute-playing in public, and as Nero's example is 
not alleged, the inference is natural that it was written before his 
time. There is no independence of style, merely a graceful re- 
flection from that of the Augustan poets. 

We must now examine the circumstances which surrounded or 
produced the splendid literature of Nero's reign. Such persons as 
from poHtical hostility to the government, or from disgust at the 

1 Suet. Claud. 41. a Id. 3 See p. 11. 

z 



354 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

flagitious conduct by whicli alone success was to be purchased, 
lived apart in a select circle, stern and defiant, unsullied by the 
degradation round them, though helpless to influence it for good. 
They consisted for the most part of virtuous noblemen such as 
Paetus Thrasea, Barea, Eubelhus Plautus, above all, Helvidius 
Priscus, on whose uncompromising independence Tacitus loves to 
dwell ; and of philosophers, moral teachers and literati, who sought 
after real excellence, not contemporary applause. The members of 
this society lived in intimate companionship, and many ladies con- 
tributed their share to its culture and virtuous aspirations. Such 
were Arria, the heroic wife of Paetus, Pannia, the wife of Helvidius, 
and Fulvia Sisenna, the mother of Persius. These held reunions 
for literary or philosophical discussions which were no mere con- 
versational displays, but a serious preparation for the terrible issues 
which at any time they might be called upon to meet. It had 
long been the custom for wealthy Eomans of liberal tastes to main- 
tain a philosopher as part of their establishment. Laelius had 
shown hospitality both to Panaetius and Polybius; Cicero had 
offered a home to Diodotus for more than twenty years, and 
Catulus and Lucullus had both recognised the temporal needs of 
philosophy. Under the Emphe the practice was still continued, 
and though liable to the abuse of charlatanism or pedantry, was 
certainly instrumental in familiarising patrician families (and 
especially their lady members) with the great thoughts and pure 
morality of the best thinkers of Greece. Prom scattered notices 
in Seneca and Quintilian, we should infer that the philosopher 
was employed as a repository of spiritual confidences — almost a 
father-confessor — at least as much as an intellectual teacher. 
"When Kanus Julius was condemned to death, his philosopher 
went with him to the scaff'old and uttered consoling words about 
the destiny of the soul;i and Seneca's own correspondence shows 
that he regarded this relation as the noblest philosophy could hold. 
Of such moral directors the most influential was Annaeus Cor- 
NUTUS, both from his varied learning and his consistent rectitude 
of life. Like all the higher spirits he was a Stoic, but a genial and 
wise one. He neither affected austerity nor encouraged rash attacks 
on power. His advice to his noble friends generally inclined 
towards the side of prudence. IN'evertheless he could not so far 
control his own language as to avoid the jealousy of Nero.^ He 

1 Sen. de. Tr. 14, 4. 

2 Nero had asked Cornutus's advice on a projected poem on Roman history 
in 400 books. Cornutus replied, *' No one. Sire, would read so long a work.'* 
Nero reminded him that Chrysippus had written as many. "True !" said 
Cornutus, " but his books are useful to mankind." 



PEESius. 355 

was banished, it is not certain in what year, and apparently ended 
his days in exile. He left several works, mostly written in Greek • 
some on philosophy, of which that on the nature of the gods has 
come down to us m an abridged form, some on rhetoric and gram- 
mar; besides these he is said to have composed satires, tragedies i 
and a commentary on Virgil. But his most important work was 
his formation of the character of one of the thi^ee Eoman satirists 
wnose works have come down to us. 

Few poets have been so differently treated by different critics as 
A. Persius Flagcus, for while some have pronounced him to be an 
excellent satirist and true poet, others have declared that his fame 
IS solely owing to the trouble he gives us to read him. He was 
born at ^olaterrae, 34 a.d., of noble parentage, brought to Eome 
as a child, and educated mth the greatest care. His first preceptor 
was the grammarian Virginius Flavus, an eloquent man endued 
with strength of character, whose earnest moral lectures drew 
down the displeasure of Caligula. He next seems to have attended 
a course under Eemmius Palaemon; but as soon as he put op the 
manly gown he attached himself to Cornutus, whose intimate 
triend he became, and of whose ideas he was the faithful ex- 
ponent. The love of the pupil for his guide in philosophy is 
beautiful and touching; the verses in which it is expressed are 
the best in Persius : 2 ^ 

** Secret! loquimur: tibi nunc hortante Camena 
Excutienda damus praecordia : quantaque nostrae 
Pars tua sit Cornute animae, tibi, dulcis amice 
Ostendisse iuvat . . . Teneros tii suscipis annos 
Socratioo Cornute sinu. Tunc fallere sellers 
Apposita intortos extendit regula mores, 
Et premitur ratione animus vincique laborat 
Artificemque tuo ducit sub poUice vultum." ' 

Moulded by the counsels of this good "doctor," Persius adopted 
philosophy with enthusiasm. In an age of hcentiousness he pre- 
served a maiden purity. Though possessing in a pre-eminent 
degree that gift of beauty which Juvenal declares to be fatal to 
innocence, Persius retained until his death a moral character 
without a stam. But he had a nobler example even than Cor- 
nutus by his side. He was tenderly loved by the great Thrasea ^ 
Whose righteous hfe and glorious death form perhaps the richest 
lesson that the whole imperial history affords. Thrasea was a 
i^ato in justice but more than a Cato in goodness, inasmuch as 
his lot was harder, and his spirit gentler and more human. Men 
liKe these clenched the theories of philosophy by that rare consis- 
1 V. Suetonius's Fita Fersii. 2 pj^^g^ ^^ 21. ■ ^ Ih. i 12 



356 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

tency wMcTi puts them into practice ; and Persius, witli all his 
literary faults, is the sole instance among Eoman writers of a 
philosopher whose life was in accordance with the doctrines he 
professed. 

Yet on opening his short hook of satires, one is strongly tempted 
to ask, What made the hoy write them ? He neither knew nor 
cared to know anything of the world, and, we fear, cannot be 
credited with a philanthropic desire to reform it. The answer is 
given partly by himseK, that he was full of petulant spleen,^ — an 
honest confession, — partly is to be found in the custom then be- 
coming general for those who wished to live well to write essays 
on serious subjects for private circulation among their friends, 
pointing out the dangers that lay around, and encouraging them 
to persevere in the right path. Of this kind are several of Seneca's 
treatises, and we have notices of many others in the biographers 
and historians. And though Persius may have intended to pub- 
lish his book to the world, as is rendered probable by the prologue, 
this is not absolutely certain. At any rate it did not appear until 
after his death, when his friend Caesius Bassus^ undertook to 
bring it out ; so that we may fairly regard it as a collection of 
youthful reflections as to the advisability of publishing which the 
poet had not yet made up his mind, and perhaps had he lived 
would have suppressed. 

Crabbed and loaded with obscure allusions as they are to a 
degree which makes most of them extremely unpleasant reading, 
they obtained a considerable and immediate reputation. Lucan 
is reported to have declared that his own works were bagatelles in 
comparison.^ Quintilian says that he has gained much true glory 
in his single book •■* Martial, that he is oftener quoted than 
Domitius Marsus in all his long Amazonis.^ He is affirmed by 
his biographer to have written seldom and with difficulty. All 
his earlier attempts were, by the advice of Cornutus, destroyed. 
They consisted of a Praetexta, named Vescia, of one book of 
travels, and a few lines to the elder Arria. Among his prede- 
cessors his chief admiration was reserved for Horace, whom he 
imitates with exaggerated fidelity, recalling, but generally distort- 
ing, nearly a hundred well-known lines. The six poems we 
possess are not all, strictly speaking, satires. The first, with the 

^ " Sed sum pefulanU splene cachinno," Pers. i. 10. 

2 Himself a lyric poet (Quint, X. i. 96) of some rank. He also wrote a 
didactic poem, De Metris, of a similar character to that of Terentianua 
Maurus. Persius died 62 a. D. 

3 Vit. Pers. : this was before he had written the Pharsalia. 

* Quint. X. i. 94. « Mart. IV. xxix. 7. 



PEESius. 357 

prologue, may be so considered. It is devoted to an attack upon 
the literary style of tlie day. Persius sees that the decay of taste 
is intimately joined with the decay of morals, and the subtle con- 
nections he draws between the two constitute the chief merit of 
the effusion. Like Horace, but with even better reason, he be- 
wails the antiquarian predilections of the majority of readers. 
Accius and Pacuvius still hold their ground, while Virgil and 
Horace are considered rough and lacking delicacy ! ^ If this last 
be a true statement, it testifies to the depraved criticism of a 
luxurious age which alternates between meretricious softness and 
uncouth disproportion, just as in life the idle and effeminate, who 
shrink from manly labour, take pleasure in wild adventure and 
useless fatigue. In this satire, which is the most condensed of all, 
the literary defects of the author are at their height. His moral taste 
is not irreproachable; in his desire not to mince matters he offends 
needlessly against propriety. ^ The picture he draws of the fashion- 
able rhetorician with languishing eyes and throat mellowed by a 
luscious gargle, warbling his drivelling ditties to an excited 
audience, is powerful and lifelike. Prom assemblies like these 
he did well to keep himseK. We can imagine the effect upon 
their used-up emotions of a fresh and fiery spirit like that of 
Lucan, whose splendid presence and rich enthusiasm threw to 
the winds these tricks of the reciter's art. 

The second, third, and fourth poems are declamatory exjsrcises 
on the dogmas of stoicism, interspersed with dramatic scenes. 
The second has for its subject the proper use of prayer. The 
majority, says Persius, utter huijing petitions {prece emaci), and 
by no means as a rule innocent ones. Pew dare to acknowledge 
their prayers (aperto vivere voto). After sixty lines of indignant 
remonstrance, he closes with a noble apostrophe, in which some of 
the thoughts rise almost to a Christian height — " souls bent to 
earth, empty of divine things ! What boots it to import these 
morals of ours into the temples, and to imagine what is good in 
God's sight from the analogies of this sinful flesh ? . . . Why do 
we not offer Him something which Messala's blear-eyed progeny 
with all his wealth cannot offer, a spirit at one with justice and 
right, holy in its inmost depths, and a heart steeped in nobleness 
and virtue % Let me but bring these to the altar, and a sacrifice 
of meal wiU be accepted !" In the third and fourth Satires he 
complains of the universal ignorance of our true interests, the 
ridicule which the world heaps on philosophy, and the hap-hazard 
way in which men prepare for arduous duties. The contemptuous 

1 Pers. i. 96. ^ ^^, i 87, 103. Cf. v. 72. 



358 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

disgust of tlie "brawny centurion at tlie (to Mm) unmeaning pro- 
blems which philosophy starts, is vigorously delineated ; ^ but 
Bome of his tableaux border on the ridiculous from their stilted 
concision and over-drawn sharpness of outline. The undeniable 
virtue of the poet irritates as much as it attracts, from its pert 
precocity and obtrusiveness. What he means for pathos mostly 
chills instead of warming : " Ut nemo in se curat descendere, 
nemo ! "^ The poet who penned this line must surely have 
been tiresome company. Persius is at his best when he forgets 
for a moment the icy peak to which as a philosopher he has 
climbed, and suns himself in the valley of natural human affec- 
tions — a reason why the fifth and sixth Satires, which are more 
personal than the rest, have always been considered greatly 
superior to them. The last in particular runs for more than half 
its length in a smooth and tolerably graceful stream of verse, 
which shows that Persius had much of the poetic gift, had his 
warped taste allowed him to give it play. 

We conclude with one or two instances of his language to jus- 
tify our strictures upon it. Horace had used the expression naso 
suspendis adunco, a legitimate and intelligible metaphor ; Persius 
imitates it, excusso po]pulum suspender e naso,^ thereby rendering it 
frigid and weak. Horace had said clament periisse pudorem Cundi 
•pacne patres ■y'^ Persius caricatures him, exdamet Melicerta ^ms5e 
Frontem de rebus. ^ Horace had said si vis me flere, dolendum est 
Primum ipsi tibi ;^ Persius distorts this iJito plorabit qui me volet 
incurvasse querela? Other expressions more remotely modelled on 
him are iratum Eupoliden praegrandi cum sene palles,^ and per- 
haps the very harsh use of the accusative, linguae quantum sitiat 
canis,^ "as long a tongue as a thirsty dog hangs out." 

Common sense is not to be looked for in the precepts of so 
immature a mind. Accordingly, we find the foolish maxim that 
a man not endowed with reason {i.e. stoicism) cannot do anything 
aright ; ^^ that every one should live up to his yearly income regard- 
less of the risk arising from a bad season ; ^^ extravagant paradoxes 
reminding us of some of the less educated religious sects of the 
present day ; with this difference, that in Eome it was the most 
educated who indulged in them. A good deal of the obscurity of 
these Satires was forced upon the poet by the necessity of avoid- 

' Pers. iii. 77. « lb. iv. 23. 

* lb. i. 116. The examples are from Nisard. * Ep. ii. 1, 80. 

^ Pers. V. 103. Compare ljVi2a,ri!&\x&Qoifrons,necfronseritidlasenatus^ 
wbere it seems to mean boldness. In Persius it = shame. ® A. P. 102. 

'' Pers. i. 91. Compare ii. 10; i. 65, with Hor. S. II. vi. 10; II. vii. 87. 
8 lb. i. 124. » lb. i. 69. " lb. v. 119. " lb. vi. 25. 



MUSONIUS EDFUS. 359 

ing everything that could be twisted into treason. "We read in 
Suetonius that K'ero is attacked in them ; but so -well is the battery 
masked that it is impossible to find it. Some have detected it in 
the prologue, others in the opening lines of the first Satire, others, 
relying on a story that Cornutus made him alter the line — 

** Auriculas asini Mida rex habet," 

to quis non habet ? have supposed that the satire lies there. Eut 
satire so veiled is worthless. The poems of Persius are valuable 
chiefly as showing a good ncdurel amid corrupt surroundings, and 
forming a striking comment on the change which had come over 
Latin letters. 

Another Stoic philosopher, probably known to Persius, was C. 
MusoNius RuFUS, like him an Etruscan by birth, and a success- 
ful teacher of the young. Like almost all independent thinkers 
he was exiled, but recalled by Titus in his old age. The influence 
of such men must have extended far beyond their personal 
acquaintance; but they kept aloof from the court. This pro- 
bably explains the conspicuous absence of any allusion to Seneca 
in Persius's writings. It is probable 'that his stern friends, Thrasea 
and Soranus disapproved of a courtier like Seneca professing 
stoicism, and would show him no countenance. He was not yet 
great enough to compel their notice, and at this time confined his 
influence to the circle of ISTero, whose tutor he was, and to those 
young men, doubtless numerous enough, whom his position and 
seductive eloquence attracted by a double charm. Of these by 
far the most illustrious was his nephew Lucan. 

M. Annaeus Lucanus, the son of Annaeus Mela and Acilia, a 
Spanish lady of high birth, was born at Corduba, 39 a.d. His 
gi^andfather, therefore, was Seneca the elder, Avhose rhetorical bent 
he inherited. Legend tells of him, as of Hesiod, that in his 
infancy a sAvarm of bees settled upon the cradle in which he lay, 
giving an omen of his future poetic glory. Brought to Eome, 
and placed under the greatest masters, he soon surpassed all his 
young competitors in powers of declamation. He is said, while a 
boy, to have attracted large audiences, who listened with admira- 
tion to the ingenious eloquence that expressed itself with equal 
ease in Greek or Latin. His uncle soon introduced him to Nero ; 
and he at once recognised in him a congenial spirit. They became 
friendly rivals. Lucan had the address to conceal his superior 
talent behind artful flattery, which Nero for a time believed 
sincere. Eut men, and especially young men of genius, cannot 
be always prudent. And if Lucan had not vaunted his success, 
Rome at least was sure to be less reticent. Nero saw that public 



360 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

opinion preferred tlie young Spaniard to himself. The mutual 
ill-feeling that had already long smouldered was kindled into 
flame hy the result of a poetical contest, at which Lucan was 
declared victorious.^ I^ero, who was present, could not conceal 
his mortification. He left the hall in a rage, and forbade the 
poet to recite in public, or even to plead in his profession. Thus 
debarred from the successes which had so long flattered his self- 
love, Lucan gave his mind to worthier subjects. He composed, 
or at least finished, the Pharsalia in the following year (65 b.c.); 
but with the haste and want of secrecy which characterised him, 
not only libelled the emperor, but joined the conspiracy against him, 
of which Piso was the head. This gave Nero the opportunity he 
desired. In vain the unhappy young man abased himself to 
humble flattery, to piteous entreaty, even to the incrimination of 
his own mother, a base proceeding which he hoped might gain him 
tjie indulgence of a matricide prince. All was useless. Nero was 
determined that he should die, and he accordingly had his veins 
opened, and expired amid applauding friends, while reciting those 
verses of his epic which described the death of a brave cen- 
turion. ^ 

The genius and sentiments of Lucan were formed under two 
difi'erent influences. Among the adherents of Caesarism, none were 
so devoted as those provincials or freedmen who owed to it their 
wealth and position. Lucan, as Seneca's nephew, naturally 
attached himself from the first to the court party. He knew of 
the Eepublic only as a name, and, like Ovid, had no reason to be 
dissatisfied with his own time. Fame, wealth, honours, all were 
open to him. We can imagine the feverish delight with which a 
youth of three and twenty found himself recognised as prince of 
Roman poets. But Lucan had a spirit of truthfulness in him that 
pined after better things. At the lectures of Cornutus, in the 
company of Persius, he caught a ghmpse of this higher hfe. And 
so behind the showy splendours of his rhetoric thbje lurks a sad- 
ness which tells of a mind not altogether content, a brooding over 
man's life and its apparent uselessness, which makes us believe 
that had he lived till middle Hfe he would have struck a lofty 
vein of noble and earnest song. At other times, at the banquet 
or in the courts, he must have met young men who hved in an 
altogether difi'erent world from his, a world not of intoxicating 

^ The accuracy of this story has been doubted, perhaps not without reason. 
Nero's contests were held every five years. Lucan had gained the prize in 
one for a laudation of Nero, 59 a.d. (?), and the one alluded to in the text 
may have been 6-4 a.1). when Nero recited his Troica. Dio. Ixii. 29. 

2 Perhaps Phars. iii. 635. The incident is mentioned by Tac, Ann. xv. 70. 



i 



LUC AN. 361 

pleasures but of gloomy indignation and sullen regret ; to whom 
the Empire, grounded on usurpation and maintained by injustice, 
was the quintessence of all that was odious ; to whom Nero was 
an upstart tyrant, and Brutus and Cassius the watchwords of jus- 
tice and right. Sentiments like these could not but be remem- 
bered by one so impressionable. As soon as the sunshine of 
favour was withdrawn, Lucan's ardent mind turned with enthu- 
siasm towards them. The Pharsalia, and especially the closing 
books of it, show us Lucan as the poet of liberty, the mourner 
for the lost Eepublic. The expression of feeling may be exagger- 
ated, and little consistent with the flattery with which the poem 
opens; yet even this flattery, when carefully read, seems fuller of 
satire than of praise : ^ 

*' Quod si non aUam venturo fata Neroni 

Invenere viam, niagnoque aeterna parantiir 

Regna dels, caehimque suo servire Tonanti 

Nou nisi saevorum potuit post bella Gigantura; 

lam nihil superi querimur! Scelera ipsa ueiasque 

Hac mercede placent ! " 

The Pliarsalia, then, is the outcome of a prosperous rhetorical 
career pji the one hand, and of a bitter disappointment which 
finds its solace in patriotic feeling on the other. It is difficult to 
see how such a poem could have failed to ruin him, even if he 
had not been doomed before. The loss of freedom is bewailed in 
words, which, if declamatory, are fatally courageous, and reflect 
perilous honour on him that used them : ^ 

" Fugiens civile nefas redituraqne nnnquam 
Libertas ultra Tigrim Rhenumque^ recessit, 
Ac toties nobis iugulo quaes! ta, vagatur, 
Germanum Scythicumque bonum, nee respicit ultra 
Ausoniam." 

It is true that his love for freedom, like that of Virgil, was based 
on an idea, not a reality. But it none the less required a great 
soul to utter these stirring sentiments before the very face of JSTero, 
the " vultus instantis tyranni " of which Horace had dreamed. 

On the fitness or unfitness of his theme for epic treatment no 
more need be added here than was said in the chapter on Virgil. 
It is, however, difficult to see what subject was open to the epic- 
ist after Virgil except to narrate the actual account of what Virgil 
had painted in ideal colours. The calm march of government 
under divine guidance from Aeneas to Augustus was one side of 
the picture. The fierce struggles and remorseless ambition of the 
Civil Wars is the other. Which is the more true ? It would bo 
1 Phars. i. 33. 8 n-,, y\i 432, 

' I.e. beyond the bounds of the Eoman empire. 



362 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

fairer tc^- ask, wMcli is the more poetical? It was Lucan's mis- 
fortune tliat the ideal side was already occupied ; he had no 
power to choose. Few who have read the Pharsalia would wish 
it unwritten. Some critics have denied that it is poetry at all.^ 
Poetry of the first order it certainly is not, but those who will 
forgive artistic defects for energy of thought and strength of feel- 
ing must always retain a strong admiration for its noble imper- 
fections. 

We shall offer a few critical remarks on the Pharsalia, refer- 
ring our readers for an exhaustive catalogue of its defects to M. 
Nisard's second volume of the Poetes de la Decadence, and con- 
fining ourselves principally to such points as he has not dwelt, 
upon. In the first place Ave observe a most unfortunate attitude 
towards the greatest problem that can exercise man's mind, his 
relation to the Superior Power. Lucan has neither the reverence 
of Yirgil, the antagonism of Lucretius, nor the awful doubt of 
Greek tragedy. His attitude is one of pretentious rebellion and 
flippant accusation, except when Stoic doctrines raise him for a 
time above himself. He goes on every occasion quite out of his 
way to assail the popular ideas of providence. To Lucretius this 
is a necessity entailed upon him by his subject ; to Lucan it is 
nothing but petulant rhetorical outburst. Por instance, he calls 
Ptolemy Fortunae pudor crimenque dcorum;^ he arraigns the 
gods as caring more for vengeance than liberty ; ^ he calls Septi- 
mius a disgrace to the gods,* the death of Pompey a tale at 
which heaven ought to blush ; ^ he speaks of the expression on 
Pompey's venerable face as one of anger against the gods,^.of 
the stone that marks his tomb as an indictment against heaven,'' 
and hopes that it may soon be considered as false a witness of his 
death as Crete is to that of Jove ; ^ he makes young Pompey, 
speaking of his father's death, say : ^' Whatever insult of fate has 
scattered his limbs to the winds, I forgive the gods that wrong, 
it is of what they have left that I complain ; " ^ saddest of all, he 
gives us that tremendous epigram : '^^ 

** Victrix causa dels placuit, sed victa Catoni." 
We recognise here a noble but misguided spirit, fretting at the dis- 

1 Martial alludes to Quintilian's judgment when he makes the Pharsalia 
say, me criticus ncgat esse poema : Sed qui me vendit bibliojjola putat. 
•^ Phars. V. 59. 

3 Si lihertatis Superis tarn curaplaceret Quam vindicta placet, Phars. iv. 805# 

4 Superum pudor, Phars. viii. 597. ^ lb. 605. 

6 lb. 665. '' lb. 800. _ 

8 lb. 869, Tarn mendax Magni tumulo quam Creta Tonantis. 

9 ib. ix. 143. " lb. i. 128. 



LUCAN. 263 

pensations it cannot approve, because it cannot understand them. 
Bitterly disgusted at the failure of the Empire to fulfil all its 
promise, the writers of this period waste their strength in unavail- 
ing upbraidings of the gods. There is a retrograde movement of 
thought since the Augustan age. Yirgil and Horace take sub- 
stantially the same view of the Empire as that which the philo- 
sophy of history has taught us is the true one; they call it a 
necessity, and express that belief by deifying its representative. 
Contrast the spirit of Horace in the third Ode of the third book : 

•* Hac arte Pollux hac vagus Hercules 
Enisus areas attigit igueas ; 

Quos inter Augustus recumbens 
Purpureo bibit ore nectar," 

with the fierce irony of Lucan : ^ 

*' JMortalia null! 
Sunt curata deo ; cladis tamen huius habemug 
Vindidam, quantam terris dare numiiia fas est. 
Bella pares su peris faciunt civilia divos ; 
Fulmiriibus manes radiisque oriiabit et astris, 
Inque Deum templis iurabit Roma per umbras^ 

Here is the satire of Cicero's second Philippic reappearing, but 
with added bitterness. ^ Being thus without belief in a divine 
providence, how does Lucan govern the world ? By blind fate, 
or blinder caprice ! Fortuna^ whom Juvenal ridicules,^ is the 
true deity of Lucan. As such she is directly mentioned ninety- 
one times, besides countless others where her agency is implied. 
A useful belief for a man like Caesar who fought his way to 
empire ; a most unfortunate conception for an epic poet to build 
a great poem on. 

Lucan's scepticism has this further disadvantage that it pre- 
cludes him from the use of the supernatural. To introduce the 
council of Olympus as Virgil does would in him be sheer mockery, 
and he is far too honest to attempt it. But as no great poet can 
dispense with some reference to the unseen, Lucan is driven to 
its lower and less poetic spheres. Ghosts, witches, dreams, 
visions, and portents, fill with their grisly catalogue a dispro- 
portionate space of the poem. The sibyl is introduced as in 
Virgil, but instead of . giving her oracle with solemn dignity, she 
first refuses to speak at all, then under threats of cruel punisli* 
ment she submits to the influence of the god, but in the midst of 
the prophetic impulse, Apollo, for some unexplained reason, 

^ Phars. vii. 454. 

^ Est ergo flamen ut lovi ... sic Divo lulio M. Antonius. Cic. Phil. ii. 

' Nos te, ,Nos facimus FortuDa deam caeloque locamus, Juv. x. ult. 



364 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

compels lier to stop short and conceal the gist of her message.^ 
Even more unpleasant is the description of Sextus Pompeius's 
consultation of the witch Erichtho ; ^ horror upon horror is piled 
up until the blood curdles at the sickening details, which even 
Southey's Thalaha does not approach — and, after all, the feeling 
produced is not horror but disgust. 

It is pleasant to turn from his irreligion to his philosophy. 
Here he appears as an uncertain but yet ardent discip]eof the Porch. 
His uncertainty is shown by his inability to answer many grave 
doubts, as : Why is the future revealed by presages?^ why are 
the oracles, once so vocal, now silent?* his enthusiasm by his 
portraiture of Cato, who was regarded by the Stoics as coming 
nearest of all men to their ideal "Wise Man. Cato is to him a 
peg on which to hang the virtues and paradoxes of the schooL 
But none the less is the sketch he gives a truly noble one : ^ 

" Hi mores, liaec duri immota Catrnis 
Secta fuit, servare modum finemqae t&nere, 
Naturamque sequi, patriaeqae impendere vitani. 
Nee sibi sed toti genituru se credere mundo." 

!N"othing in all Latin poetry reaches a higher pitch of ethical sub- 
limity than Cato's reply to Labienus when entreated to consult 
the oracle of Jupiter Ammon : ^ " What would you have me ask ] 
whether I ought to die rather than become a slave ? whether life 
begins here or after death 1 whether evil can hurt the good man ? 
whether it be enough to will what is good? whether virtue is 
made greater by success ? All this I know already, and Hammon's 
voice will not make it more sure. We all depend on Heaven, and 
though oracles be silent we cannot act without the will of God. 
Deity needs no witness : once for all at our birth he has given us 
all needful knowledge, nor has he chosen barren sands accessible 
to few, or buried truth in a desert. Where earth, sea, sky, and 
virtue exist, there is God. Why seek we Heaven outside?" 
These, and similar other sentiments scattered throughout the poem, 

1 Phars. V. 110, sqq. ^ lb. vi. 420-830. » j^. ii. 1-15. 

4 lb. V. 199. 5 lb. ii. 380. 

^ lb. ix. 566-586. This speech contains several difficulties. In v. 567 the 
reading is uncertain. The MS. reads An sit vita nihil, sed longam differat 
aetas't which has been changed to et Tonga 1 an differat aetas? but the 
original #eading might be thus translated, " Or whether life itself is nothing, 
but the years we spend here do but put off a long {i.e. an eternal) life?" 
This would refer to the Druidical theory, which seems to have taken great 
hold on him, that life in reality begins after death. See i. 457, longae vitae 
Mors media est, which exactly corresponds with the sentiment in this 
passage, and exemplifies the same use of longits. 



LUCAN. 365 

redeem it from tlie charge of wanton disbelief, and show a large- 
ness of soul that only needed experience to make it truly great. 

In discussing political and social questions Lucan shows con- 
siderable insight. He could not, any more than his contempora- 
ries, understand that the old oligarchy was an anachronism ; that 
the stubborn pride of its votaries needed the sword to break it. . 
Eut the influence of individual genius is well pourtrayed by him, 
and he seizes character with a vigorous grasp. As a partisan of 
the senate, he felt bound to exalt Pompey ; but if we judge by 
his own actions and his own words, not by the encomiums heaped 
on liim by the poet, Lucan's Pompey comes very near the genuine 
historical man. So the Caesar sketched by Lucan, though meant 
to be a villain of the blackest dye — if we except some blood- 
thirsty speeches — stands out as a true giant of energy, neither 
meaner nor more unscrupulous than the Caesar of history. 
Domitius, Curio, and Lentulus, are vigorous though somewhat 
defective portraits. Cornelia is the only female character that 
calls for notice. She is drawn with breadth and sympathy, and 
bears all the traits of a great Roman matron. The degradation of 
the people is a constant theme of lamentation. It is wealth, 
luxury, and the effeminacy that comes with them that have 
softened the fibre of Eome, and made her willing to bear a master. 
This is indeed a common-place of the schools, but it is none the 
less a gloomy truth, and Lucan would have been no Roman had 
he omitted to complain of it. Equally characteristic is his con- 
tempt for the lower orders ^ and the influx of foreigners, of whom 
Rome had become the common sink. Juvenal, who evidently 
studied Lucan, drew from him the picture of the Tiber soiled by 
Orontes's foul stream, and of the Bithynian, Galatian, and Cappa- 
docian knights. ^ 

With regard to the artistic side of the poem the firct and most 
obvious criticism is that it has no hero. Eut if this be a fault, it 
is one which it shares with the Divina Commedia and Paradise 
Lost. As Satan has been called the hero of the latter poem, so 
Caesar, if not the hero, is the protagonist of the Pharsalia. Eut 
Cato, Pompey, and the Donate as a body, have all competed for 
this honour. The fact is this : that while the primitive epic is 
altogether personal, the poem whose interest is national or human 
cannot always find a single hero. It is after all a narrow criticism 
that confines the poet's art within such strict limits. A great poet 

^ Capit impia plebes Cespite patricio somnos, Phars. vii. 760. 

^ Vivant Galataeque, Syrique, Cappadoces, Galliqne, extremique orbis Iberi, 
Armenii, Cilices, nam post oivilia bella Hie populus llomanus erit, lb. vii. 335. 
Compare Juv. iii. 60 ; vii. 15. 



366 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

can hardly avoid changing or at least modifying the existing canona 
of art, and Lucan should at least be judged with the same liberality 
as the old annalists who celebrated the wars of the Eepublic. 

In description Lucan is excellent, both in action and still life, 
but more in brilliancy of detail than in broad effects. His defect 
lies in the tone of exaggeration which he has acquired in the 
schools, and thinks it right to employ in order not to fall below his 
subject. He has a true opinion of the importance of the Civil War, 
which he judges to be the final crisis of Eome's history, and its 
issues fraught with superhuman grandeur. The innate materialism 
of his mind, however, leads him to attach outivard magnitude to all 
that is connected with it. Thus Xero, the offspring of its throes, 
is entreated by the poet to be careful, when he leaves earth to take 
his place among the immortals, not to seat himseK in a quarter 
where his weight may disturb the just equihbrium of the globe ! ^ ' 
And, similarly, all the incidents of the Civil War exceed the parallel 
incidents of every otlier war in terror and vastness. Do portents 
presage a combat? they are such as defy all power to conceive. 
Pindus mounts upon Olympus,^ and others of a more ordinary but 
still amazing character follow.^ Does a naval conflict take placed 
the horrors of all the elements combine to make it the most hideous 
that the mind can imagine. Fire and water vie with each other in 
devising new modes of death, and where these are inactive, it is only 
because a land-battle with all its carnage is being enacted on the 
closely-wedged ships.^ Has the army to march across a desert 1 the 
entire race of venomous serpents conspires to torture and if possible 
extirpate the host ! ^ This is a very inartistic mode of heightening 
effect, and, indeed, borders closely on that pursued in the modern 
sensation novel. It is beyond question the worst defect of the 
Pharsalia, and the extraordinary ingenuity with which it is done 
only intensifies the misconduct of the poet. 

Over and above this habitual exaggeration, Lucan has a decided 
love for the ghastly and revolting. The instances to which allu- 
sion has aheady been made, viz. the Thessalian sorceress and the 
dreadful casualties of the sea-fight, show it very strikingly, but 
the account of the serpents in the Libyan desert, if possible, stiU 
more. The episode is of great length, over three hundred lines, 
and contains much mythological knowledge, as well as an appal- 
ling power of description. It begins with a discussion of the 
question, Why is Africa so full of these plagues % After giving 
various hypotheses he adopts the one which assigns their origii2 

1 Phars. i. 56. ^ ib. vii. 174. 

^ See the long list, ii. 525, and the admirable criticism of Isi. Nisard. 

* Phars. iii. 538, sqq. ^ lb. ix. 735. 



LUCAN. ' 367 

• 

to Medusa's hairs whicli fell from Perseus's hand as he sailed 
through the air. In order not to lure people to certain death by- 
appearing in an inhabited country, he chose the tracldess wastes 
of Africa over which to wing his flight. The mythological dis- 
quisition ended, one on natural history follows. The peculiar 
properties of the venom of each species are minutely catalogued, 
first in abstract terms, then in the concrete by a description of 
their effects on some of Cato's soldiers. The first bitten was the 
standard-bearer Aulus, by a dipsas, which afflicted him with 
intolerable thirst; next Sabellus by a seps, a minute creature 
whose bite was followed by an instantaneous corruption of the 
whole body ; ^ then K'asidius by a prester which caused his form 
to swell to an unrecognisable size, and so on through the list of 
serpents, each episode closing with a brilliant epigram which 
clenches the effect. ^ Trivialities like these would spoil the 
greatest poem ever penned. It need not be said that they spoil 
the Pliarsalia. 

Another subject on which Lucan rings the changes is death. 
The word mors has an unwholesome attraction to his ear. Death 
is to him the greatest gift of heaven ; the only one it cannot take 
avvay. It is sad indeed to hear the young poet uttering senti- 
ments like this : ^ 

** Scire mori sors prima viris, sed proxima cogi," 
and again — ^ 

" Victurosque dei celant, ut vivere durent, 
Felix esse ino)-i." 

So in cursing Crastinus, Caesar's fierce centurion, he mshes him 
not to die, but to retain sensibility after death, in other words to 
be immortal. The sentiment occurs, not once but a himdred 
times, that of all pleasures death is the greatest. He even plays 
upon the word, using it in senses which it will hardly bear. 
Lihjcae mortes are serpents ; Accessit morti Lihije, " Libya added 
to the mortality of the army ; " nulla cruentae tantum moHis 
hahet; "no other reptile causes a death so bloody." To one so 
unhealthily familiar with the idea, the reahty, when it came, 
seems to have brought unusual ten-ors. 

The learning of Lucan has been much extolled, and in some 
respects not without reason. It is complex, varied, and allusive, 

^ Of the seps Lu^an says, Cyniphias inter pestes tibi palma nocendi est ; 
Eripiant omnes animam, tic sola cadaver (Phars. ix. 788). 

2 In allusion to the swelling caused by the prester, Non ausi tradere bnsto, 
Nondum stante modo, cresccns fugere cadaver! Of the iaculus, a species 
which launched itself like an arrow at its victim, Deprensum est, quae funda 
rotat, quam lenta volarent, quam segnis Scythicae strideret arundinis aer. 

3 Phars. ix. 211. * lb. iv. fi20. 



368 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITEEATUEE. 

but its extreme obscurity makes us suspect even when we cannot 
prove, inaccuracy. He is proud of his manifold acquirements. 
JS^thing pleases him more than to have an excuse for showing his 
information on some abstruse subject. The causes of the chmate 
of Africa, the meteorological conditions of Spain, the theory of 
the globes, the geography of the southern part of our hemisphere, 
the wonders of Egypt and the views about the source of the Nile, 
are descanted on with diffuse erudition. But it is evidently 
impossible that so mere a youth could have had a deep knowledge 
of so many subjects, especially as his literary productiveness had 
aheady been very great. He had written an lliacon according to 
Statins,! a book of Saturnalia^ ten books of Silvae, a Catach- 
thonion, an unfinished tragedy called Medea, fourteen Salticae 
fahulae (no doubt out of comphment to Nero), a prose essay against 
Octavius Sagitta, another in favour of him, a poem De Incendio 
Urbis, in which Nero was satirised, a KaraKavo-fjib? (which is 
perhaps dilFerent from the latter, but may be only the same under 
another title), a series of letters from Campania, and an address 
to his wife, Polla Argentaria. 

A peculiar, and to us offensive, exhibition of learning consists 
in those tirades on comm.on-place themes, embodying all the stock 
current of instances, of which the earliest example is found in the 
catalogue of the dead in Virgil's Cidex. Lucan, as may be sup- 
posed, delights in dressing up these well-worn themes, painting 
them with novel splendour if they are descriptive, thundering 
in fiery epigrams, if they are moral. Of the former class are two 
of the most effective scenes in the poem. The first is Caesar's 
night voyage in a skiff over a stormy sea. The fisherman to 
whom he applies is unwilling to set sail. The night, he says, 
shows many threatening signs, and, by way of deterring Caesar, 
he enumerates the entire list of prognostics to be found in Aratus, 
Hesiod, and Virgil, with great piquancy of touch, but without the 
least reference to the propriety of the situation. 2 Nothing can be 
more amusing, or more out of place, than the old man's sudden 
erudition. The second is the death of Scaeva, who for a time 
defended Caesar's camp single-handed. The poet first remarks 
that valour in a bad cause is a crime, and then depicts that of 
Scaeva in such colossal proportions as almost pass the limits of 
burlesque. After describing him as pierced with so many spears 
that they served him as armour, he adds : ^ 

*' Nee quicqiiam nudis vitalfbus obstat 
lam, praeter stantes in summis ossibus hastas." 

» Silv. ii. 7, 54. 2 pi^^rs. v. 540. » lb. vi. 195. 



LUCAN. 369 

This is grotesque enoiigli ; the banqnet of birds and beasts who 
feed on the slain of Pharsalia is even worse. ^ The details are too 
loathsome to quote. Suffice it to say that the list includes every 
carrion-feeder among flesh and fowl who assemble in immense 
flocks : 

"''Nnnquam tan to sc vulture caelum 

Induit, aut ^Ixxxes presserunt aethere pennae." 

We have, however, dwelt too long on points like tbese. We 
must now notice a few features of liis style which mark him as 
the representative of an epoch. First, his extreme cleverness. In 
splendid extravagance of expression no Latin author comes near 
him. The miniature painting of Statius, the point of Martial, 
are both feeble in comparison ; for Lucan's language, though often 
tasteless, is always strong. Some of his lines embody a condensed 
trenchant vigour which has made them proverbs. Phrases like 
Trahimur sub nomine pads — Momentumque fuit mutatus Curio 
rerumj recall the pen of Tacitus. Others are finer still Caesar's 
energy is rivalled by the line — 

"Nil actum credens dum quid superesset agendum." 

The duty of securing liberty, even at the cost of blood, was never 
more finely expressed than by the noble words : 

"Tgnoratque datos ne quisquam serviat enses." 
Curio's treachery is pilloried in the epigram, 

**Emere omnes, hie vendidit Urbem.''^ 
The mingled cowardice and folly of servile obedience is nobly 
expressed by his reproach to the people : 

" Usque adeone times, quern tu facis ipso timendum ? "^ 

An author who could write like this had studied rhetoric to some 
purpose. Unhappily he is oftener difiuse than brief, and some- 
times he becomes tedious to the last degree. His poetical art is 
totally deficient in variety. He knows of but one method of 
gaining eff'ect, the use of strong language and plenty of it. If 
Persius was inflated with the vain desire to surpass Horace, Lucan 
seems to have been equally aUibitious of excelliug Yirgil. He 
rarely imitates, but he frequently competes with him. Over and 
over again, he approaches the same or similar subjects. Virgil 
had described the victory of Hercules over Cacus, Lucan must 
celebrate his conflict with Antaeus ; Yirgil had mentioned the 
portents that followed Caesar's death, Lucan must repeat them 
with added improbabilities iu a fresh context ; his sibyl is but a 

1 Pbais. vii. 825. 2 jj, jy §2? 3 jj, ,>. 185J 

2 A 



370 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATUEE. 

tasteless counterpart of Virgil's; Ms catalogues of forces have 

Yirgil's constantly in view ; his deification of l^ero is an exagger- 
ation of that of Augustus, and even the celebrated simile in which 
Virgil admits his obligations to the Greek stage has its parallel ia 
the Pliarsalia.^ 

!N'evertheless Lucan is of all Latin poets the most independent 
in relation to his predecessors. It needs a careful criticism to 
detect his knowledge and imitation of VirgiL As far as other 
poets go he might never have read their works. The impetuous 
course of the Pliarsalia is interrupted by no hterary reminiscences, 
no elaborate setting of antique gems. He was a stranger to that 
fond pleasure with which Virgil entwined his poetry round the 
spreading branches of the past, and wove himself a wreath out of 
/lowers new and old. This lack of delicate feeling is no less evident 
in his rhythm. Instead of the inextricable harmonies of Virgil's 
cadence, we have a succession of rich, forcible, and polished 
monotonous lines, rushing on without a thought of change until 
the period closes. In formal skill Lucan was a proficient, but his 
ear was duU. The same caesuras recur again and again, ^ and the 
only merit of his rhythm is its undeniable originality.^ The com- 
position of the Pliarsalia must, however, have been extremely 
hurried, judging both from the fact that three books only were 
finished the year before the poet's death, and from various indica- 
tions of haste in the work itself. The tenth book is obviously un- 
finished, and in style is far more careless than the rest. Lucan's 
diction is tolerably classical, but he is lax in the employment of cer- 
tain words, e.g. mors, fatum, pati (in the sense of vivere), and affects 
forced combinations from the desire to be terse, e.g., degener toga,*" 
stimulis negare,^ nutare regna, " to portend the advent of des- 
potism ;"6 meditari Leucada, " to intend to bring about the cata- 

^ The two passages are, Eumenidum veluti demens videt agmina Pentheus 
Et solem geminum et duplices se ostendere Thebas; Aut Agamemd- 
nonius scaeuis agitatus Orestes Armatum facibus matrem et squaleutibus 
hydris cum fugit, ultricesque sedent in limine Dirae (Aen. iv. 469). Lu- 
can's (Phars, vii. 777), ruus, Hand alios nondum Scythica purgatus in ara 
Eumenidum vidit vultus Pelopeius Orestes : Nee magis attonitos animi 
sensere tumultus, Cum fureret, Pentheus, aut cum desisset, Agave. 

2 Particularly that after the third foot, which is a feature in his style 
(Phars. vii. 464), Facturi qui monstra ferimt. This mode of closing a period 
occurs ten times more frequently than any other, 

'^ 1 have collected a few instauces where he imitates former poets: — Lucre- 
tius (i. 72-80), Ovid (i. 67 and 288), Horace (v. 403), by a characteristic 
epigram; Virgil in several places, the chief being i. 100, though the phrase 
belli mora is not Virgil's; ii. S2, 290, 408, 696; iii. 234, 391, 440, 605; 
iv. 392; v. 313, 6I0''; vi. 217, 454; vii. 467, 105, 512, 194; viii. 864; 
X. 373. •* Phars. i. 363. » i^^ ^m 3, 6 ib_ i 529. 



CALPURNIUS SICULTTS. 371 

stroplie of Actium, "^ and so on. "We observe also several innovations 
in syntax, especially the freer use of the infinitive {vivere durent) 
after verbs, or as a substantive, a defect he shares with Persius 
{scire tuum); and the employment of the future participle to 
state a possilDility or a condition that might have been fulfilled, 
e.g., unumque caput tarn magna inventus Privatum factura timet 
veliit ensihus ijjse Imperet invito moturus milite helium.'^ A strong 
depreciation of Lucan's genius has been for some time the rule of 
criticism. And in an age when little time is allowed for reading 
any but the best authors, it is perhaps undesirable that he should 
be rehabilitated. Yet throughout the Middle Ages and during 
more than one great epoch in French history, he was ranked 
among the highest epic poets. Even now there are many scholars 
who greatly admire him. The false metaphor and exaggerated 
tone may be condoned to a youth of twenty-six; the lofty pride 
and bold devotion to liberty could not have been acquired by an 
ignoble spirit. He is of value to science as a moderately accurate 
historian who supplements Caesar's narrative, and gives a faithful 
picture of the feeling general among the nobility of his day. He 
is also a prominent representative of that gifted Spanish family 
who, in various ways, exercised so immense an influence on subse- 
quent Eoman letters. His mfe is said to have assisted in the 
composition of the poem, but in what part of it her talents fitted 
her to succeed we cannot even conjecture. 

To Nero's reign are probably to be referred the seven eclogues 
of T. Calpurnius Siculus, and the poem on Aetna, long attributed 
to Virgil. These may bear comparison in respect of their want of 
originality with the Satires of Persius, though both fall far short 
of them in talent and interest. The MSS. of Calpurnius contain, 
besides the seven genuine poems, four others by a later and much 
inferior writer, probably Nemesianus, the same who wrote a poem 
on the chase in the reign of Xumerian. These are imitated from 
Calpurnius much as he imitates Yirgil, except that the decline in 
metrical treatment is greater. The first eclogue of Calpurnius is 
devoted to the praises of a young emperor who is to regenerate the 
world, and exercise a wisdom, a clemency, and a patronage of the 
arts long unknown. He is celebrated again in Eclogue IV., the 
most pretentious of the series, and, in general, critics are agreed 
that Nero is intended. The second poem is the most successful of 
all, and a short account of it may be given here. Astacus and 
Idas, two beauteous youths, enter into a poetical contest at which 
Thyrsis acts as judge. Faunus, the satyrs, and nymphs, " Sicco 

1 Phars. V. 479 « lb. v. 364. 



372 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATUEE. 






Dryades pede ' Naides udo,' are present. The rivers stay their 
course; the winds are hushed; the oxen forget their pasture; the 
bee steadies itself on poised wing to listen. An amoebean contest 
ensues, in which the rivals closely imitate those of Virgil's 
seventh eclogue, singing against one another in stanzas of four 
lines. Thyrsis declines to pronounce either conqueror : 

*' Este pares : et ab hoc Concordes vivite : nam vos 
Et decor et cantus et amor sociavit et aetas." 

The rhythm is pleasing; the style simple and flowing; and if we 
did not possess the model we might admire the copy. The tone 
of exaggeration which characterises all the poetry of Nero's time 
mars the reality of these pastoral scenes. The author professes 
great reverence for Virgil, but does not despair of being coupled 
with him (vi. 64) : 

** Magna petis Corydon, si Tityrus esse laboras." 

And he begs his wealthy friend Meliboeus (perhaps Seneca) to 
introduce his poems to the emperor (Eel. iv. 157), and so fulfil 
for him the office that he who led Tityrus to Eome did for the 
Mantuan bard. If his vanity is somewhat excessive we must allow 
liim the merits of a correct and pretty versifier. 

The didactic poem on Aetna is now generally attributed to 
LuciLius Junior, the friend and correspondent of Seneca. Scaliger 
printed it with Virgil's works, and others have assigned Cornelius 
Severus as the author, but several considerations tend to fix our 
choice on Lucilius. First, the poem is beyond doubt much later 
than the Augustan age ; the constant reproduction, often uncon- 
scious, of Virgil's form of expression, implies an interval of at 
least a generation ; allusions to Manilius^ may be detected, and 
perhaps to Petronius Arbiter, ^ but at the same time it seems to have 
been written before the great eruption of Vesuvius (69 a.d.), in 
which Pliny lost his life, since no mention is made of that event. 
All these conditions are fulfilled by Lucilius. Moreover, he is 
described by Seneca as a man who by severe and conscientious 
study had raised his position in life (which is quite what we 
should imagine from reading the poem), and whose literary attain- 
ments were greatly due to Seneca's advice and care. " Asscro te 
mihi : meum opus es," he says in one of his epistles,^ and in 
another he asks him for the long promised account of a voyage 
round Sicily which Lucilius had made. He goes on to say, "I 

^ Mduentia astra, 51 ; Sinus irdex, 247. Cf. Man. i. 399 sqq. 
'2 The rare form Ditis—Dis occurs in these two writers. 
^ Ep. 34, 2. 



THE POEM ON AETNA. 373 

hope you will describe Aetna, the theme of so many poets' song. 
Ovid was not deterred from attempting it though Yirgil had 
occupied the ground, nor did the success of both of these deter 
Cornel. Severus. If I know you Aetna excites in you the desire 
to -write ; you wish to try some great Avork which shall equal the 
fame of your predecessors. "^ As the poem fui-ther shows some 
resemblances to an essay on Aetna, published by Seneca himself, 
the conclusion is almost irresistible that Lucilius is its author. 

Though by no means equal to the reputation it once had, the 
poem is not without merit. The diction is much less stilted than 
Seneca's or Persius's ; the thoughts mostly correct, though rather 
tame; and the descriptions accurate even to tediousness. The 
arrangement of his subject betrays a somewhat weak hand, 
though in this he is superior to Gratius Faliscus ; but he has an 
earnest desire to make truth known, and a warm interest in his 
theme. The opening invocation is addressed to Apollo and 
the Muses, asking their aid along an unwonted road. 

He denies that eruptions are the work of gods or Cyclopes, and 
laments over the errors that the genius of poetry has spread 
(74_92)— 

**Plurima pars scaenae fallacia." 

The scenes that poets paint are rarely true, and often very hurtful, 
but he is moved only with the desire to discover and communicate 
truth. He then begins to discuss the power of confined air 
when striving to force a passage, and the porous nature of the 
interior of the earth ; and (after a fine digression on the thirst for 
knowledge), he examines the properties of fire, and specially its 
effect on the different minerals composing the soil of Aetna. A 
disproportionate amount (nearly 150 lines) is given to describing 
lava, after which his theory is thus concisely summarised — 

*' Haec operis forma est : sic nobilis uritur Aetna : 
Terra foraminibiis vires trahit, urget in artum, 
Spiritus incendit: vivit per maxima saxa." 

The poem concludes with an account of a former eruption, signal- 
ised by the miraculous preservation of two pious youths who ven- 
tured into the burning shower to carry their parents into a place 
of safety. The poem is throughout a model of propriety, but 
deficient in poetic inspiration ; the technical parts, elaborate as 
they are, impress the reader less favourably than the digressions, 
where subjects of human interest are treated, and the Eoman 
character comes out. Lucilius called himself an Epicurean, and 
is so far consistent as to condemn the " fallacia vatum " and the 

1 Ep. 79, 1, 5, 7. 



374 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

superstition that will not recognise the sufficiency of physical 
causes; but he (v. 537) accepts Heraclitus's doctrine about the 
universality of fire, and in other places shows Stoic leanings. He 
imitates Lucretius's transitions, and his appeals to the reader, e.g. 
160 : Falleris et nondum certo tihi lumine res est, and inserts 
many archaisms as ulli for ullius, opus governing an accus. 
cremant for cremantur, auras (gen. sing.) iuhar (masc.) aureus.^ 
His rhythm resembles Virgil, but even more that of Manilius. 

We cannot conclude this chapter without some notice of 
the tragedies of Seneca. There can be no reasonable doiibt that 
they are the work of the philosopher, nor is the testimony of 
antiquity really ambiguous on the point. ^ "When he wrote them 
is uncertain ; but they bear every mark of being an early exercise 
of his pen. Perhaps they were begun during his exile in Corsica, 
when enforced idleness must have tasked the resources of his 
busy mird, and continued after his return to Eome, when he 
found that l^ero was addicted to the same pursuit. There are 
eight complete tragedies and one praetexta, the Odavia, which is 
gei erally supposed to be by a later hand, as well as considerable 
fri gments Irom the Thehais and Phoenissae. The subjects are all 
frcm the well-worn repository of Greek legend, and are mostly 
drawn from Euripides. The titles of Medea, Hercules furens, 
Hippolytus, and Troad.es at once proclaim their origin, but the 
Hercules Oetaeus, Oedipus Tlujestes, and Agamemuon, are pro- 
bably based on a comparison of the treatment by the several Attic 
masters. The tragedies of Seneca have as a rule been strongly 
censured for their rhetorical colouring, their false passion, and their 
total want of dramatic interest. They are to the Greek plays as 
gaslight to sunlight. But in estimating their poetic value it is 
fair to remember that the Eoman ideas of art were neither so 
accurate nor so profound as ours. The deep analysis of Aristotle, 
which grouped all poets who wrote on a theme under the title 
rhetorical, and refused to Empedocles the name of poet at all, 
would not have been appreciated by the Eomans. To them the 
form was what constituted a work poetical, not the creative idea 
that underlay it. To utilise fictitious situations as a vehicle for 
individual conviction or lofty declamation on ethical commonplace, 

1 See V. 208, 216, 304, 315, 334. 

^ Tac. A. xiv. 52, carmina crebrius factitare points to tragedy, since that 
was Nero's favourite study. Mart. i. 61 7, makes no distinction between 
S°neca the philosopher and Seneca the tragedian, nor does Quint, ix. 2, 8, 
Medea ajmd Senecam, seem to refer to any but the well-known name. M. 
Nisaid hazards the conjecture that they are a joint production of the family ; 
tlie rhetorician, his two sons Seneca and Mela, and his grandson Lucau 
liavin<; euch worked at them 1 



THE TRAGEDIES OF SENECA. 375 

was considered quite legitimate even in the Augustan age. And 
Sensca did but follow the example of Yarius and Ovid in the 
tragedies now before us. It is to the genius of German criticism, 
so wonderfully similar in many ways to that of Greece, that we 
owe the re-establishment of the profound ideal canons of art over 
the artificial technical maxims which from Horace to Voltaire had 
been accepted in their stead. The present low estimate of Seneca 
is due to the reaction (a most healthy one it is true) that has 
replaced the extravagant admiration in which his poems were for 
more than two centuries held. 

The worst technical fault in these tragedies is their violation of 
the decencies of the stage. Manto, the daughter of Tiresias and a 
great prophetess, investigates the entrails in public. Medea kills 
her children coram- populo in defiance of Horace's maxim. These 
are inexcusable blemishes in a composition which is made accord- 
ing to a prescribed recipe. His " tragic mixture," as it may be 
called, is compounded of equal proportions of description, declama- 
tion, and philosophical aphorisms. Thus taken at intervals it 
formed an excellent tonic to assist towards an oratorical training. 
It was not an end in itself, but was a means for producing a 
finished rhetor. This is a degradation of the loftiest kind of 
poetry known to art, no doubt ; but Seneca is not to blame for 
ha\dng begun it. He merely used the material which lay before 
him; nevertheless, he deserves censure for not having brought 
into it some of the purer thoughts which philosophy had, or ought 
to have, taught him. Instead of this, his moral conceptions fall 
far below those of his models. In the Phaedra of Greek tragedy 
we have that chastened and pathetic thought, which hangs Hke a 
burden on the Greek mind, a thought laden with sadness, but a 
sadness big with rich fruit of reflection; the thought of guilt 
unnatural, involuntary, imposed on the sufferer for some inscrutable 
reason by the mysterious disj^ensation of heaven. Helen, the 
queen of ancient song, is the offspring of this thought ; Phaedra 
in another way is its ofi'spring too. But as Virgil Jiad degraded 
Helen, so Seneca degrades Phaedra. Her love for Hippolytus is 
the coarse sensual craving of a common-place adulteress. The 
language in which it is painted, stripped of its ornament, is revolt- 
ing. As Dido dwells on the broad chest and shoulders of Aeneas,^ 
so Phaedra dwells on tlie healthy glow of Hippolytus's cheek, his 
massive neck, his sinewy arms. The Roman ladies who bestowed 
their caresses on gladiators and slaves are here speaking through their 
coui'tly mouthpiece. The gross, the animal — it is scarcely even 

1 Aen. iv. 11, Con. . 



i 



376 HISTORY OF KOMAN LITERATURE. 

sensuous — ^predominates all througli these tragedies. Truly the 
Greeks in teaching Rome to desire beauty had little conception of 
the fierceness of that robust passion for self-indulgence which they 
had taught to speak the language of aesthetic love I 

A feature worth noticing in these dramas is the descriptive 
power and brilliant philosophy of the choruses. They are quite 
unconnected with the plot, and generally either celebrate the praises 
of some god, e.g., Bacchus in the Oedipus, or descant on some moral 
theme, as the advantage of an obscure lot, in the same play. The 
edat of their style, and the pungency of their epigrams is startling. 
In sentiment and language they are the very counterpart of his 
other works. The doctrine of fate, preached by Lucan as well as 
by Seneca in other places, is here inculcated with every variety of 
point. 1 We quote a few lines from the 0cdi]jus : 

Fatis agimur : cedite fatis. 
Not! sollicitae possunt curae 
Mutare rati stamina fiisi 
Qnicquid patimur, raortale genus, 
Q;iicquid facimus venit ex alto ; 
Servatque suae decrcta colus 
Lachesis, dura revoluta manu. 
Omnia certo tramite vadunt, 
Primusque dies dedit extremum. 
Nou ilia deo vertisse licet 
Quae nexa suis cuiruut causis. 
It cuique ratus, prece non ulla 
Mobilis, ordo. 



I 



Here we have in all its naked repulsiveness the Stoic theory of 
predestination. Prayer is useless ; God is unable to influence 
events ; Lachesis the wrinkled beldame, or fate, her blind symbol, 
has once for all settled the inevitable nexus of cause and effect. 

The rhythm of these plays is extremely monotonous. The greater 
part of each is in the iambic trimeter ; the choruses generally in 
anapaests, of which, however, he does not understand the structure. 
The synaphea peculiar to this metre is neglected by him, and the 
rule that each system should close with a paroemiac or dimeter 
cataledic is constantly violated. 

With regard to the Odavia, it has been thought to be a product 
of some mediaeval imitator ; but this is hardly likely. It cannot 
be Seneca's, since it alludes to the death of Nero. Besides its 
style is simpler and less bombastic and shows a much tenderer 
feeling ; it is also infinitely less clever. Altogether it seems best 
to assign it- to the conclusion of the first century. 

1 Hippol. 1124 and Oed. 979, are the finest examples. 



THE ^ ATroKoXoKvvToxris. SI 7 

The only other work of Seneca's which shows a poetical form is 
the 'ATTOKoAoKWTOJo-ts or *' Pmnpkinificatioii " of the emperor 
Claudius, a bitter satire on the apotheosis of that heavy prince. 
Seneca had been compelled, much against the grain, to offer him 
the incense of flattery while he Kved. He therefore revenged him- 
self after Claudius's death by this sorry would-be satire. The only 
thing witty in it is the title ; it is a mixture of prose and verse, 
and possesses just this interest for us, that it is the only example 
we possess of the Menippean satire, unless we refer the work of 
Petronius to this head. 



CHAPTEE in 

The Reigns of Caligula, Claudius, and Kero. 
2. Prose Writers — Seneca. 

Of all the imperial writers except Tacitus, Seneca is beyond com- 
parison the most important. His position, talents, and influence 
make him a perfect representative of the age in which he lived. 
His career was long and chequered : his experience brought him 
into contact with nearly every phase of hfe. He was born at 
Cordova 3 a.d. and brought by his indulgent father as a boy to 
Eome. His early studies were devoted to rhetoric, of which he 
tells us he was an ardent learner. Every day he was the first at 
school, and generally the last to leave it. "While still a young 
man he made so brilliant a name at the bar as to awaken Caligula's 
jealousy. By his father's advice he retired for a time, and, having 
nothing better to do, spent his days in philosophy. Seneca was 
one of those ardent natures the virgin soil of whose talent shows 
a luxurious richness unknown to the harassed brains of an old 
civilisation. His enthusiasm for philosophy exceeded all bounds. 
He first became a Stoic. But stoicism was not severe enough for 
his taste. He therefore tm'ned Pythagorean, and abstained for 
several years from everything but herbs. His father, an old man 
of the world, saw that self-denial like this was no less perilous 
than his former triumphs. " Why do you not, my son," he said, 
" why do you not live as others live 1 There is a provocation in 
success, but there is a worse provocation in ostentatious abstinence. 
You might be taken for a Jew (he meant a Christian). Do not 
draw down the wrath of Jove." The young enthusiast was wise 
enough to take the hint. He at once dressed himself en mode, 
resumed a moderate diet, only indulging in the luxury of abstinence 
from wine, perfumes, warm baths, and made dishes ! He was now 
35 years of age ; in due time Caligula died, and he resumed his 
pleadings at the bar. He was appointed Quaestor by Claudius, 
and soon op3ned a school for youths of quality, which was very 
numerously attended. His social successes were striking, and 



LIFE OF SENECA. 379 

bronglit him into tronble. He was suspected of improper intimacy 
with Julia, the daughter of Germanicus, and in 41 a.d. was exiled 
to Corsica. This was the second blow to his career. But it was 
a most fortunate one for his genius. In the lonely solitudes of a 
barbarous island he meditated deeply over the truth of that philo- 
sophy to which his first devotion had been given, and no doubt 
struck out the germs of that mild and catholic form of it which has 
made his teaching, with all its imperfections, the purest and 
noblest of antiquity. While there he wrote many of the treatises 
that have come down to us, besides others that are lost. The 
earhest in all probability is the Consolatio ad Marcicun, addressed 
to the daughter of Cremutius Cordus, which seems to have been 
written even- before his exile. ]N"ext come two other Consola- 
tiones. The first is addressed to Polybius, the powerful freedman 
of Claudius. It is full of the most abject flattery, uttered in the 
hope of procuring his recall from banishment. That Seneca did 
not object to Avrite to order is unhappily manifest from his pane- 
gyric on Claudius, delivered by Xero, which was so fulsome that, 
even while the emperor recited it, those who heard could not control 
their laughter. The second Consolation is to his mother Helvia, 
whom he tenderly loved ; and this is one of the most pleasing of 
his works. Already he is beginning to assume the tone of a philo- 
sopher. His work De Ira must be referred to the commencement 
of this period, shortly after Caligula's death. It bears all the 
marks of inexperience, though its eloquence and brilliancy are 
remarkable. He enforces the Stoic thesis that anger is not an 
emotion, just in itself and often righteously indulged, but an evil 
passion which must be eradicated. This view which, if supported 
on grounds of mere expediency, has much to recommend it, is here 
defended on a priori principles without much real reflection, and 
was quite outgrown by him when taught by the experience of riper 
years. In the Constantio Sapientis he praises and holds up to 
imitation the absurd apathy recommended by Stilpo. In the 
De Animi Tranquillitate, addressed to Annaeus Serenus, the cap- 
tain of Nero's body-guard,^ he adojDts the same line of thought, but 
shows signs of limiting its application by the necessities of circum- 
stances. The person to whom this dialogue is addressed, though 
praised by Seneca, seems to have been but a poor philosopher. 
In complaisance to the emperor he went so far as to attract to 
himself the infamy which IS^ero incurred by his amours with a 
courtesan named Acte ; and his end was that of a glutton rather 
than a sage. At a large banquet he and many of his guests were 
poisoned by eating toadstools 1^ 

1 Praefectus vigiium. ^ Plin. N. H. xxii. 23, 47. 



380 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE 

It was Messalina who had procured Seneca's exile. "Wlien 
Agrippina succeeded to her influence he was recalled. This am- 
bitious woman, aware of his talents and pliant disposition, and 
perhaps, as Dio insinuates, captivated by his engaging person, con- 
trived to get him appointed tutor to her son, the young Nero, now 
heir-apparent to the throne. This was a post of which he was not 
slow to appropriate the advantages. He rose to the praetorship 
(50 A.D.) and soon after to the consulship, and in the short space 
of four years amassed an enormous fortune.^ This damaging cir- 
cumstance gave occasion to his numerous enemies to accuse him 
before Nero ; and though Seneca in his defence^ attributed all his 
wealth to the unsought bounty of his prince, yet it is difficult to 
beheve it was honestly come by, especially as he must have been 
well paid for the numerous violations of his conscience to which 
out of regard to Nero he submitted. Seneca is a lamentable 
instance of variance between precept and example.^ The authentic 
bust which is preserved* of him bears in its harassed expression 
unmistakable evidence of a mind ill at ease. And those who 
study his works cannot fail to find many indications of the same 
thing, though the very energy which results from such unhappiness 
gives his ^vritings a deeper power. 

The works written after his recall show a marked advance in 
Ms conceptions of life. He is no longer the abstract dogmatist, 
but the supple thinker who finds that there is room for the 
philosopher in the world, at court, even in the inner chamber of the 
palace. To this period are to be referred his three books De de- 
mentia, which are addressed to Nero, and contain many beautiful 
and wholesome precepts; his De Vita Beata. addressed to his 
brother Novatus (the Gallio of the Acts of the Apostles), and 
perhaps the admirable essay De Beneficiis. This, however, more 
probably dates a few years later (60-62 a.d.). It is full of 
digressions and repetitions, a common fault of his style, but 
contains some very powerful thought. The animus that dictates 
it is thought by Charpentier to be the desire to release himself 
from all sense of obligation to Nero. It breathes protest through- 
out ; it proves that a tyrant's benefits are not kindnesses. It gives 
what we may call a casuistry of gratitude. Other philosophical 
works now lost are the Exhortationes, the De Officiis, an essay on 
premature death, one on superstition, in Avhich he derided the 
IDopular faith, one on friendship, some books on moral philosophy, 

1 Said to have amounted to 300,000,000 sesterces. Tac. An. xiii. 42. 
Juvenal calls him i^raedivcs. Sat. x, 16. ^ An. xiv. 53. 

^ The great blot on his character is his having composed a justification of 
Nei-o's matricide on the plea of state necessity. 



DEATH OF SENECA. 381 

on remedies for cliance casualties, on poverty and compassion. 
He wrote also a biography of his father, many political speeches 
delivered by ISTero, a panegyric on Messalina, and a collection of 
letters to IsTovatus. 

The Stoics affected to despise physical studies, or at any rate to 
postpone them to morals. Seneca shared this edifying but far 
from scientific persuasion. Eut after his final withdrawal from 
court, as the wonders of nature forced themselves on his notice, 
lie reconsidered his old prejudice, and entered with ardour on 
the contemplation of physical phenomena. Besides the Naturales 
Quaestiones^ a great part of which still remain, he wrote a treatise 
De Motu Terrarum, begun in his youth but revised in his old age, 
and essays on the properties of stones and fishes, besides mono- 
graphs on India and Egypt, and a short fragment on " the form of 
the universe." These, however, only occupied a portion of his time, 
the chief part was given to self-improvement and those beautiful 
letters to Lucilius which are the most important remains of his 
works. Since the death of Burrus, who had helped him to influ- 
ence Nero for good, or at least to mitigate the atrocious tendencies 
of his disposition, Seneca had known that his position was insecure. 
A prince who had killed first his cousin and then his mother, would 
not be likely to spare his preceptor. Seneca determined to fore- 
stall the danger. He presented himself at the palace, and entreated 
Kero to receive back the wealth he had so generously bestowed. 
Instead of complying, IN'ero, in a speech full of specious respect, 
but instinct with latent malignity, refused to accept the profiered 
gift. The ex-minister knew that his doom was sealed. He at 
once relinquished all the state in which he had lived, gave no more 
banquets, held no more levees, but abandoned himseK to a voluntary 
poverty, writing and reading, and practising the asceticism of his 
school. But this submission did not at all satisfy I^ero's vengeance. 
He made an insidious attempt to poison his old friend. This was 
, revealed to Seneca, who henceforth ate nothing but herbs which 
he gathered with his own hand, and drank only from a spring 
that rose in his garden. Soon afterwards occurred the conspiracy 
of Piso, and this gave his enemies a convenient excuse for accusing 
him. It is impossible to believe that he was guilty. I^ero's 
thirst for his blood is a sufficient motive for his condemnation. 
He was bidden to prepare for death, which he accordingly did 
with alacrity and firmness. In the fifteenth book of the Annals 
of Tacitus is related with that wondrous power which is peculiar 
to its author, the dramatic scene which closed the sage's life. The 
best testimony to his domestic virtue is the deep afi'ection of his 
young wife Paulina. Eef using aU entreaty, she resolutely deter- 



S82 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

mined to die with, her husband. They opened their veins top^ether ; 
she fainted away, and Avas removed by her friends and with diffi- 
culty restored to life ; he, after suffering excruciating agony, which 
he endured with cheerfulness, discoursing to his friends on the 
glorious realities to which he was about to pass, was at length 
sufiPocated by the vapour of a stove. Thus perished one of the 
weakest and one of the most amiable of men ; one who, had he 
had the courage to abjure pubhc life, would have been reverenced 
by posterity in the same degree that his talent has been admired. 
As it is, he has always found severe judges. Dio Cassius 
soon after his death wrote a biography, in which all his acts re- 
ceived a malignant interpretation. Quintilian disliked him, and 
harshly criticised his literary defects. The pedant Fronto did the 
same. Tacitus, with a larger heart, made allowance for his temp- 
tations, and while never glossing over his unworthy actions, has 
yet shown his love for the man in spite of all by the splendid 
tribute he pays to the constancy of his death. 

The position of Seneca, both as a philosopher and as a man ot 
letters, is extremely important, and claims attentive consideration in 
both these relations. As a philosopher he is usually called a Stoic. 
In one sense this appellation is correct. "When he places himself 
under any banner it is always that of Zeno. ISTevertheless it would 
be a great error to regard him as a Stoic in the sense in which Brutus, 
Cato, and Thrasea, were Stoics. Like all the greatest Eoman thinkers 
he was an Eclectic ; he belonged in reality to no school. He was 
the successor of such men as Scipio, Ennius, and Cicero, far more 
than of the rigid thinkers of the Porch. He himself says, " Nullius 
nomen fero."^ The systematic teachers of the Eoman school, as 
distinct from those who were rather patriots than philosophers, 
had become more and more liberal in their speculative tenets, 
more and more at one upon the great questions of practice. Since 
the time of Cicero philosophic thought had been flowing steadily 
in one direction. It had learnt the necessity of appealing to men's 
hearts rather than convincing their intellects. It had become a 
system of persuasion. Eabianus was the first who clearly proposed 
to himself, as an end, to gain over the afi'ections or to arouse the 
conscience. He was succeeded, under Tiberius, by Sotion the 
Pythagorean and Attains the Stoic,^ of botli of whom Seneca had 
been an ardent pupil. Demetrius the Cynic, in a ruder way, had 
worked for the same object.^ In this gradual convergence of 

1 Ep. 45, 4; cf. 2, 5. 2 Ep. 110, 18. 

' He was a scunilous a"biiser of the government. Vespasian once said to 
liim, " Yon want to provoke me to kill yon, tnt I am not going to order a 
dog that barks to execution." Cf. Sen. Ep. 67, 14 ; De ben. vii. 2. 



PHILOSOPHY OF SENECA. 383 

diverse scliools metapliysics were necessarily put aside, and ethics 
occupied the first and only place. Each school claimed for itself 
the best men of all schools. " He is a Stoic/'^ says Seneca, " even 
though he denies it." The great conclusions of abstract thought 
brought to light in Greece were now to be tested in their applica- 
tion to life. " The remedies of the soul have been discovered long 
ago ; it is for us to learn how to apply them." Such is the grand 
text on which the system of Seneca is a comment. This system 
demands, above all things, a knowledge of the human heart. And 
it is astonishing how penetrating is the knowledge that Seneca 
displays. His varied experience opened to him many avenues of 
observation closed to the majority. His very position, as at once 
a great statesman and a great moralist, naturally attracted men to 
him. And he used his opportunities with signal adroitness. But 
his ability was not the only reason of this peculiar insight. Cicero 
was as able ; but Cicero had it not. His thoughts were occupied 
with other questions, and do -not penetrate into the recesses of the 
souL The reason is to be found in the circumstances of the time. 
For a man to succeed in life under a regime of mutual distrust, 
which he himself bitterly compares to the forced friendship of the 
gladiatorial school, a deep study of character was indispensable. 
Wealth could no longer be imported i^ it could only be redistributed. 
To gain wealth was to despoil one's neighbour. And the secret of 
despoiling one's neighbour was to understand his weakness: if 
possible, to detect his hidden guilt, ^oi Seneca only but all the 
great writers of the Empire show a marked famiharity with the 
pathology of mind. 

Seneca tells us that he loves teaching above all tilings else; that 
if he loves knowledge it is that he may impart it.^ For teaching 
there is one indispensable prerequisite, and two possible domains. 
The prerequisite is certainty of one's self, the domains are those 
of popular instruction and of private direction. Seneca tricj first 
of all to ensure his o^^vn conviction. "JSTot only," he says, "do I 
beheve all I say, but I love it."* He tries to make his published 
teachings as real as possible by assuming a conversational tone.^ 
They have the piquancy, the discursiveness, the brilliant flavour 
of the salon. They recal the converse of those gifted men who 
pass from theme to theme, thro^wdng light on all, but not exhaust- 
ing any. But Seneca is the last man to assume the sage. Except 

1 Ep. 64, 2. 

* Or at least in a much less degree. Tacitus and Juvenal give instances 
of rapacity exercised on the provinces, but it must have been inconsiderable 
as compared with what it had been. 

3 Ep. 6, 4. * Ep. 75, 3 • Ep. 75, 1. 



384 HISTORY OF eomajS^ literature. 

pedantry, nothing is so alien from him as the assumption of good- 
ness. " When I praise virtue do not suppose I am praising myself, 
but when I blame vice, then believe that it is myself I bfame." i 

Thus confident but unassuming, he proceeds to the communica- 
tion of wisdom. And of the two domains, whHe he acknow- 
ledges both to be legitimate,2 he himself prefers the second. He 
is no writer for the crowd ; his chosen audience is a few selected 
spirits. To such as these he wished to be director of conscience., 
guide, and adviser in all matters, bodily as well as spiritual 
This was the calHng for which, like Fenelon, he felt the keenest 
desire, the fullest aptitude. We see his power in it when we 
read Lis Consolations; we see the intimate sympathy which dives 
into the heart of his friend. In the letters to Lucihus, and in 
the Tranquillity of the Soul, this is most conspicuous. Serenus 
had written complaining of a secret unhappiness or malady, he 
knew not which, that preyed upon his mind and frame, and 
would not let him enjoy a moment's peace. Seneca analyses his 
complaint, and expounds it with a vivid clearness which betrays % 
first-hand acquaintance with its symptoms. If to that anguish of 
a spirit that preys on itself could be added the pains of a yearn- 
ing unknown to antiquity, we might say that Seneca was en- 
lightening or comforting a Werther or a Ren^.3 

Seneca's object, therefore, was remedial ; to discover the malady 
and apply the restorative. The good teacher is artifex vivendi.^ 
He does not state principles, he gives minute precepts for every 
circumstance of life. Here we see casuistry entering into morals 
but it is casuistry of a noble sort. To be effective precepts must 
be repeated, and with every variety of statement. "To knock 
once at the door when you come at night is never enough; the 
blow must be hard, and it must be seconded. 5 Eepetition it not 
a fault, it is a necessity." Here we see the lecturer emphasising 
by reiteration what he has to say. 

iVnd what has he to say? His system taken in its main out- 
hnes IS rigid enough ; the quenching of all emotion, the indiffer- 
ence to all things external, the prosecution of virtue alone, the 
mortification of the body and its desires, ihe adoption of voluntpry 
povert3\ These are views not only severe in thsmselves, but 
views which we are surprised to see a man like Seneca inculcate. 

1 Vit. Beat. 11,6. 
^^ ^?' ^?' }' iJ? *r^^"I!?.''^^ philosophy to sun-light, which shines on 
%li ^^ different from Plato : rh irXrieos a.^{,paTov <pi\6ao(pov 

^ Martha, Les Moralistes de V Empire romain. 

' ^f- *^- ^Ep. 38, 1; and 94, 1. 



SENECA'S SYSTEM FULL OF CONCESSIONS. 385 

Tlie truth is he does not really inculcate them. In theory rigid, 
his system practises easily. It is more fall of concessions than 
ary other system that was ever broached. It is the inevitable 
result of an ambitious creed that when applied to life it should 
teem with inconsistencies. Seneca deserves praise for the con- 
spicuous cleverness with which he steers OA^er such dangerous 
shoals. The rigours of "virtue uneD'^umbQrcd " might be 
preached to a patrician whose honoured name made obscurity im- 
possible ; but as for the freedmcn, capitalists, and nouveaux riches^'- 
of all kinds, who were Seneca's friends, if poverty was necessary for 
virtue, where would they be 1 Their greatness was owing solely 
to their wealth. Thus he wisely offered them a more accommo- 
dating doctrine, viz., that riches being indiiferent need not be given 
up, that the good rich man differs from the bad in spirit, not in 
externals, &c., palliatives with wliich we are all familiar. To 
take another instance. The Stoic system forbade all emotion. 
Yet we find the philosopher weeping for his Avife, for his child, for 
his slave. But he was far too sensible not to recognise the noble- 
ness of such expressions of feeling ; so he contents himseK with 
saying ^^ indulgeantur non imxjerentur.^^ '^ 

In reading the letters we are struck by the continual reference 
to the insecurity of riches, the folly of fearing death, torture, or 
infamy, and are tempted to regard these as mere commonplaces of 
the schools. They had, however, a melancholy fitness at the 
time they were uttered, which we, fortunately, cannot realise. A 
French gentleman, quoted by Boissier,^ declared that he found 
the moral letters tedious until the reign of terror came ; that then, 
being in daily peril of his life, he understood their searching 
power. At the same time this power is not consistent; the 
vacillation of the author's mind communicates itself to the person 
addressed, and the clear grasp of a definite princi2:)le wliich lent 
such strength to Zeno and the early Stoics is indefinitely diluted 
in the far more elotjuent and persuasive reflections of his Koman 
lepresentative. 

Connected with the name of Seneca is a question of surpassing 
interest, which it would be unjust to our readers to pass entirely 
by. AYe allude to the belief universal in the Church from the 
time of Jerome until the sixteenth century, and in spite of strong 
disproof, not yet by any means altogether given up, that Seneca 
was personally acquainted with St. Paul,^ and borrowed, some of 

^ Such as Serenus, Lucilius, &c. The old famihes seem to have eschewed him. 
2 Vit. Beat. 17, 1. ^ l\. Bavet, Boiss. BM. rom. vol. ii. 44. 

^ The question is sifted in Aubertiu, ,Scncqitc ct Saint Paul; and iu 
Gaiitou Boissier, La Itcligion romainc, vol. IL cli. ii. 

2b 



386 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

his noblest tliouglits from the Apostle's teach ing. The first testi- 
mony to this belief is given by Jerome,^ who assigns, as his sole 
and convincing reason for naming Seneca among the worthies of 
the Church that his correspondence with Paul was extant. This 
correspondence, which will be found in Haase's edition of the 
philosopher, is now admitted on all hands to be a forgery. But 
we might naturally ask : Does it not point to an actual coiTes- 
pondence which is lost, the traditional remembrance of which 
gave rise to its later fictitious reproduction 1 To this the answer 
must be : Jerome knew of no such early tradition. All he 
knew was that the letters existed, and on their existence, which 
he did not critically investigate, he founded his claim to admit 
Seneca within the Church's pale. 

The problem is by no means so simple as it appears. It in- 
volves two separate questions : first, a historical one which has 
only an antiquarian interest. Did the philosopher know the 
Apostle? secondly, a more important one for the history of re- 
ligious til ought. Do Seneca's writings contain matter which could 
have come from no source but the teaching of the first Christians. 

As regards the first question, the arguments on both sides are 
as follows : — On the one hand, Gallio, wdio saw Paul at Coiinth, 
was Seneca's brother, and Eurrus, the ca23tain of the praetorian 
cohort, before whom he was brought at Ptome, was Seneca's most 
intimate friend. What so likely as that these men should have 
mtroduced their prisoner to one whose chief object was to find, 
ou*: truth? Again, there is a well authenticated tradition that 
Acte, once the concubine of Il^J'ero,^ and the only person who was 
found to bury him, was a convert to the Christian faith ; and if 
converted, who so hkely to have been her converter as the great 
Apostle ? Moreover, in the Epistle to the Philippians, St. Paul 
salutes " them that are of Caesar's household," and it is thought 
that Seneca may here be specially intended. On the other side 
it is argued that the phrase, " Caesar's household," can only refer 
to slaves and freedmen : to apply it to a great magistrate at a 
time when as yet noblemen had not become body-servants op 
grooms of the chamber to the monarch, would have been nothing 
short of an insult ; that Seneca, if he had heard of Paul or of 
Paul's Master, w^ould naturally have mentioned the fact, com- 
municative as he always is ; that fear of persecution certainly need 
not have restrained him, especially since he rather liked shocking 

^ De Yir. Ilhist. 12. TertuUian (Ap. ii. 8, 10) had said before, Seneca 
saepe noster ; but this only means that he often talks like a Christian. 

^ He afterwards repudiated her, and she died in great poverty. Her act 
shows a gentle and forgiving spirit. 



RELATIOX OF SEXECA TO CIIPJSTIANITY. 387 

people's ideas than otlien^dse ; that everywhere he shows contempt 
and nothing but contempt for the Jews, among whom as yet the 
Christians were reckoned ; in short, that he appears to know 
nothing whatever of Christians or their doctrines. 

As to this latter point there is room for difference of opinion. 
It is by no means clear that Cliristianity was unknown to the 
court in jN'ero's reign. We find in Suetonius ^ a notice to the effect 
that Claudius banished the Jews from Eome for a sedition headed 
by Chrestus. JN'ow Suetonius knew well enough that Christus, 
not Chrestus, was the name of the Founder of the new religion ; 
it is therefore reasonable to suppose that in this passage he is quot- 
ing from a police-magistrate's report dating from the time of 
Claudius. Again, it is certain that under ISTero the Christians 
were knov/n as an unpopular sect, on whom he might safely wreak 
his mock vengeance for the burning of the city ; and it is equally 
certain that his abominable cruelty excited a warm sympathy 
among the people for the persecuted. ^ The Jews were well known; 
hundreds practised their ceremonies in secret; even as early as 
Horace^ we know that Sabbaths were kept, and the Mosaic 
doctrines taught to noble men and women. The penalties inflicted 
on these innocent victims must have been at least talked of in 
Eome, and it is more than probable that Seneca must have been 
familiar with the name of the despised sect.* So far, therefore, 
we must leav^e the question open, only stating that while the 
balance of probability is decidedly against Seneca's having had 
any personal knowledge of the Apostle, it is in favour of his having 
at least heard of the religion he represented. 

With regard to the second question, whether Seneca's teaching 
owes anything to Christianity, we must fii^st observe, that philo- 
sophy to him was altogether a question of practice. Like all the 
other thinkers of the time he cared nothing for consistency of 
opinion, everything for impressiveness of apphcation. He was 
Stoic, Platonist, Epicurean, as often as it suited him to employ 
their principles to enforce a moral lesson. Thus in his Naturales 
Qitaestiones,^ where he has no moral object in view, he speaks of the 
Deity as Mens Universi, or Natura i^sa, quite in accordance with 

^ Claud. 25, ^^ ludaeos impul.sore Chresto assicUie tumultuantes expulit.'^ 

^ Tac. An. XV. 44. ^ Hodie tricesima Sabbata, S. I. ix. 

* We have seeu how the great orators Crassus and Antonius pretended 
that they did not know Greek : the same silly pride made others pretend 
they had never heard of the Jews, even while tliey were practising the ]\Iosaic 
lites. And the number of noble names (Cornelii, Pomponii, Caecilii) in- 
scribed on Christian tombs in the reigns of the Ai.tonines proves that Chris- 
tianity had made way even among the exclusive nobiUty of Rome. 

» Prol. 13 ; ii. 45. 



383 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITEllATURE. 

Stoic pantheism. But in the letters to Lucilius, which are -wholly 
moral, he uses the language of religion : " The great soul is that 
which yields itself up to God ; "^ "All that pleases Him is good ;"2 
" He is a friend never far ofi;"^ " He is our Father ;"4 " It is from 
Him that great and good resolutions come ;"^ " He is worshipped 
and loved ;"*^ " Prayer is a witness to His care for us."^ There is 
no doubt in these passages a strong resemblance to the teaching of 
the I^ew Tescament. There are other points of contact hardly 
less striking. The Stoic doctrine of the soul affirms the cessation 
of existence after death. So Zeno taught; but Chrysippus 
allowed the souls of the good an existence until the end of the 
world, and Cleanthes extended this privilege to all souls alike. 
Seneca sometimes speaks as a Stoic,^ and denies immortality: 
sometimes he admits it as an ennobling belief;^ sometimes he 
declares it to be his own conviction,^^ and uses the beautiful ex- 
pression, so common in Christian literature, that the day of death 
is the birth-day of eternity. ^^ The coincidence, if it is nothing 
more than a coincidence, is marvellous. But before assuming any 
closer connection we must take these passages with their respective 
contexts, and with the principles which, whether consistently main- 
tained or not, undoubtedly underlie his whole teaching. We 
must remem])er that if Seneca had known the Gospel, the day he 
first heard of it must have been an epoch in his life.^^ And yet we 
meet with no allusion Avhich could be construed into an admission 
of such a debt. And besides, the expressions in question do not 
all belong to one period of the philosoiDlier's life ; they occur in 
his earhest as well as in his latest compositions, though doubtless 
far more frequently in the latter. Hence we may explain them 
partly by the natural progress in enlightenment and gentleness 
during the century from Cicero to Seneca, and partly also by the 
moral development of the philosopher himself. ^^ Eesemblances of 
terms, however striking, must not count for more than they are 
worth. It is more important to ask whether the sinrit of Seneca's 

1 107, 12. 2 74^ 20. 3 Frag. 123. 

^ Ep. 110, 10, parens noster. ^ 41, 2. ^ Ep. 47, 18. 

'' Benef, iv. 12. 

8 Kg. In the C'onsol ad Mnx. 19, 5; acl Polyh. 9, 3. Even^in Ep. 106, 4, 
he says, anivius corjnis est. Cf, 117, 2. ^ 57, 7-9 ; 63, 16. 

^° 86, 1, aniinum eius in coelum, ex quo erat, redisse persuade milii. 

^1 102, 26. 

^■^ Some have thought that if he did not know St Paul (who came to Eome 
hetween 56 and 61 a.d. when Seneca was no longer young) he may have 
heard some of the earlier missionaries in Rome. 

1=^ He could not have been occui)ied for years in governing the world, and, 
with his desire for virtue, not have risen to nobler conceptions than those 
v/iih which he began. 



RELA.TION OF SENECA TO CHRISTIANITY. 389 

teaching is at all like that of the Gospel. Are his ideas Christian 1 
Tv"e meet with strong recommendations to charity, kindness, bene- 
volence. To a splenetic acquaintance, ont of humour with the 
world, he cries out, eccjuando amahis ? " When will you learn to 
love?"^ But with him charity is not an end; it is but a means 
to fortify the sage, to render him absolutely self-sufficient. Egoism 
is at the bottom of this high precept ;2 and this at once removes 
it from the Christian category. And the same is true of his 
account of the wise man's relations to God. They are based on 
2Jralc^ not humility ; they make him an equal, not a servant, of 
tlie Deity : Sajnens cum dis ex pari vivit ;^ and again, Deo socius 
non 8up])lex.^ JSTothing could be f urtlier from the jSTew Testament 
tlian this. If therefore Seneca borrowed anything from Chris- 
tianity, it was the morahty, not the doctrines, that he borrowed. 
But this is no sooner stated than it is seen to be altogether incon- 
ceivable. To suppose that he took from it precepts of life and 
neglected the higher truths it announced, is to regard him as foolish 
or blind. With his intense yearning to penetrate to the mysteries 
of our being, it is impossible that the only solution of them offered 
as certain to tlie world shoidd have been neglected by him as not 
worth a thought.^ 

We therefore conclude that Seneca received no assistance from 
the preachers of the new religion, that his philosophy was the 
natural development of the thoughts of his predecessors in a mind 
at once capacious and smitten with the love of virtue. He cannot 
be regarded as an isolated phenomenon ; he was made by the ages, 
as he in his turn helped to make the ages that followed ; and if we 
possessed the writings of those intermediate thinkers who busily 
wrouglit among the citizens of Eome, striving by persuasion, 
precept, and example, to wean them from their sensuality and 
violence, we should probably see in Seneca's thoughts a less 
astounding individuality than we do. 

It has often been said that he prepared the way for Christianity. 
But even this is hard to defend. In his enunciation of the 
brotherhood of man,"^ of the unholiness of war,^ of the sanctity of 
human life,^ of the rights of slaves,^ aud their claims to our affec- 
tion,^^ in his reprobation of gladiatorial shows, he holds the place 

1 De. Ira, iii. 28, 1 ; cf. id. i. 14, 3. 2 jy^ q^^^ jj g^ 2. 

3 Ep. 59, 14 ; 31, 3. * 53, 11; cf. Prov. m. 

5 This is the more cogent, because we find that the pliilosophers wlio were 
converted to Christianity all turned at once to \i& principles, often callinjj; it 
a philosophia. Its practice they admired also ; but this was not the first 
object of their attention. 

« Kp. 95, 52. 7 Ep. 95, 20. » Ep. 96, 33, homo sacra res homini. 

* Ben. iii. 2S, 2. ^'^ Ep. 47, hun biles amid. 



3530 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

of a moral pioneer, the more honourable, since none of those before 
him, except Cicero, had had largeness of heart enough to recognise 
these truths. By his fierce attacks on paganism, i for which%ot 
being a born Eoman) he has no sympathy and no mercy, he did 
good service to the pure creed that was to follow. By his con- 
t(5mpt of science, 2 in which he asserts we can never be more than 
children, he paved the way for a recognition of the supremacy of 
the moral end ; but at the same time his own mind is sceptical 
quite as much as it is religious. He resembles Cicero far more 
than Virgil. The current after Augustus ran towards behef and 
even credulity. Seneca arrests rather than forwards it. His 
philosophy was the proudest that ever boasted of its claims, 
" Promittit ut parem Deo faciat." 3 His popularity was excessive, 
especially with the young and wealthy members of the new 
nobility of freedmen. The old Eomans avoided him, and his 
great successors in philosophy, Epictetus and Marcus AureHus, 
never even mention his name. 

As a man of letters Seneca wielded an incalculable influence. 
What Lucan did for poetry, he did for prose, or rather, he did 
far more ; while Lucan never superseded Virgil as a model except 
for expression, Seneca not only superseded Cicero, but set the 
style in which every succeeding author either Avrote, tried to write, 
or tried not to write. To this there is one exception — the younger 
Pliny. But Plorus, Tacitus, Pliny the elder, and Curtius, are 
deeply imbued with his manner and style. Quintilian, though 
anxiously escheAving all imitation of him, continually falls into i't ; 
there was a charm about those short, incisive sentences which none 
who had read them could resist ; as Tacitus well says, there was in 
hmi mcje?uum amoenum et temiMvis eius aurihus accommodahim. 
It is in vain that Quintilian goes out of his way to bewail his 
broken periods, his wasted force, his sweet vices. The words of 
Seneca are hke those described in Ecclesiastes, " they are as goads 
or as nails driven in." There is no possibility of missing their 
point, no fear of the attention not being arrested. If he repeats 

1 In the treatise De Superstitione, of which several fragments remain. It is, 
ho'.vever, probable that Seneca would have equally disliked any positive re- 
ligion. He regards the sage as his own temple. 

'^ Ep. 88, 37. There is a celebrated passage in one of his tragedies (Med. 
370) where he speaks of our limited knowledge, and thinks it probable that 
a great New World will be discovered : " Venient annis secida seris Quihus 
Oceanvs vivcula rcrum Laxct, ct ingens imtcat tcllus, Tcthysque novos detegat 
orbcs Ncc sit terns ultima T/mle," an announcement alnwst prophetic. 

_ Ep. 48, 11. He did not advise, but he allowed, suicide, as a remedy for 
misfortune or disgrace. It is the one thing that makes the wise man even 
siiporior to the gods, that at any moment he chooses he ean cease to be ! 



STYLE OF SENECA. 391 

over and over again, that is after all a fault that can be pardoned, 
especially when each repetition is more brilliant than its prede- 
cessor. And considering the end he proposed to himself, viz., to 
teach those who as yet were " novices in wisdom," we can hardly 
regard such a mode of procedure as beside the mark. Where it 
fails is in what touches Seneca himself, not in what touches the 
reader. It is a style which does injustice to its author's heart. 
Its glitter strikes us as false because too brilliant to be true ; a man 
in earnest would not stop to trick his thoughts in the finery of 
rhetoric ; here as ever, the showy stands for the bad. We do not 
intend to defend the character of the man ; if style be the true 
reflex of the soul, as in all great writers without doubt it is, we 
allow that Seneca's style shows a mind wanting in gravity, that 
is, in the highest Eoman excellence. His is the bright enthusiasm 
of display, not the steady one of duty ; but though it be lower it 
need not be less real. There are warriors who meet their death 
with a song and a gay smile ; there are others who meet it with 
stern and sober resolve. But courage calls both her children. 
Christian Europe has been kinder and juster to Seneca than was 
pagan Eome. Eome while she copied, abused him. Neither as 
Spaniard nor as Eoman can he claim the name of sage. The higher 
philosophy is denied to both these nations. But in brilliancy of 
touch, in delicious abandon of sparkling chat, all the more delight- 
ful because it does us good in genial human feeling, none the less 
warm, because it is masked by quaint apophthegms and startling 
paradoxes, Seneca stands facile princeps among the \viiters of the 
Empire. His works are a mine of quotation, of anecdote, of 
caustic observations on life. In no other writer shaU. we see so 
speaking a picture of the struggle betAveen duty and pleasure, 
between virtue and ambition ; from no other writer shall we gain 
so clear an insight into the hopes, fears, doubts, and deep, abiding 
dissatisfaction which preyed upon the better spirits of the age. 



CHAPTEE lY. 

The Eeigns of Caligula, Claudius, and Kero. 
3. Other Prose Writers. 

We have dwelt fully on Seneca because lie is of all the Claudian 
writers the one best fitted to appear as a type of the time. There 
were, however, several others of more or loss note who deserve a 
short notice. There is the historian Domitius Corbulo,i who 
wrote under Caligula (39 a.d.) a history of his campaigns in Asia, 
and to whom Pliny refers as an authority on topographical and 
ethnographical questions. He was executed by iN'ero (67 a.d.) 
and his wealth confiscated to the crown. 

^ Another historian is Quintus Curtius, whose date has been 
disputed, some placing him as early as Augustus, in direct con- 
tradiction to the evidence of his style, which is moulded on that 
of Seneca, and of his political ideas, Avhich are those of heredi- 
tary monarchy. Others again place him as late as the time of 
Severus, an ojDinion to which Niebuhr inclined. But it is more 
probable that he lived in the time of Claudius and the early years 
of ISTero.^ His work is entitled Hlstoriae Alexandri Magni, and 
is drawn from Clitarchus, Timagenes, and Ptolomaeus. It con- 
sisted of ten books, of which all but the first two have come down 
to us. He paid more attention to style than matter, showing 
neither historical criticism nor original research, but putting down 
everything that looked well in the relating, even though he him- 
self did not believe it. 

Spain was at this time very rich in authors. Por more than 
half a century she gave the Empire most of its greatest names. 
The entire epoch has been called that of Spanish Latinity. L. 
Junius Moderatus Columella was born at Gades, probably^ near 

1 Tac. An. xv. 16. 

2 For a full list of all tlie arguments for and against these dates the reader 
is referred to Teuffel, R. L. § 287. 

^ The exact date is uncertaiu. He speal<s of Seneca as living, probably 
between 62 and 65 a.d. Eat lie never mentions Pliny, Avlio, on the contrniy, 
frednently refers to him. He must, therefore, have hnished his work before 
Pliuv became celebrated. 



COLUMELLA. 393 

the beginning of oiir era. His grandfatlier was a man of sub- 
stance in that part of the province, and a most successful farmer ; 
it was from him that he imbibed that love of agricultural pursuits 
which led him to Avrite his learned and elegant treatise. This 
treatise, which has come down to us entire, and consists of twelve 
books, was intended to form jjart of an exhaustive treatment of the 
subject of agriculture, including the incidental questions (e.g. those 
of religion)^ connected with it. It was expanded and improved 
frcm a smaller essay, of which we still possess certain fragments. 
The work is written in a clear, comprehensive way, drawn not only 
from the best authorities, but from the author's personal experi- 
ence. Like a true Eoman (it is astonishing how fully these 
provincials entered into the mind of Eome) he descants on the 
dignity of the subject, on the lapse from old virtue, on the idle- 
ness of men who will not labour on their land and draw forth its 
riches, and on the necessity of taking up husbandry in a practical 
business-like way. The tenth book, which treats of gardens, is 
written in smooth verse, closely imitated from the Georciics. It is 
in fact intended as a fifth Georgia. Yirgil had said^ with reference 
to gardens : 

*' Yenun haec ipse equidem spatiis exclusiis iniqnis 
Praetereo, at que aliis post me memoranda relinqao." 

These words are an oracle to Columella. " I should have 
Avritten my tenth book in prose," he says, "had not your fre- 
quent requests that I would fill up Avhat was wanting to the 
Georcjics got the better of my resolution. Even so, I should 
not have ventured on poetry if Virgil had not indicated that he 
wished it to be done. Inspired, therefore, by his divine influence, 
I have approached my slender theme." The verses are good, though 
their poetical merit is somewhat on the level of a university prize 
poem. They conclude thus : 

** Hactemis arvorum cultus Silvine docebam 
Siderei reterens vatis praecepta Maronis." 

Among scientific writers we possess a treatise by Scribonius 
Largus (47 A.D.) on Comiiositiones Medicae, which is characterised 
by TeufTel as " not altogether nonsensical, and in tolerable st3de, 
although tinged with the general superstition of the period." The 
critic Q. AscoNius Pedianus (3-88 a.d.) is more important. He 
devoted his life to an elaborate exegesis of the great Latin classics, 
more particularly Cicero. His commentary on the Orations, of 

^ Perhaps the treatise Adversus Astrologos was written with the object of 
recommending the worship of the rural deities (xii. 1, 31). In one place (ii. 
225") he says he intends to treat of liistrationcs ccteraque sacrificia. 

2'G. iv. 148. 



394 HISTOBY OF ROMAN LITEKATUKE. 

which we possess considerable fragments,^ is written with sound" 
sense, and in a clear pointed style. Some commentaries on the 
Verrine Speeches which hear his name, are the work of a much 
later hand, though perhaps drawn in great part from him. An- 
other series of notes, extending to a considerable number of 
orations, was discovered by Mai,^ but these also have been re- 
touched by a later hand. 

An interesting treatise on primitive geography, manners and 
customs {Chronograpliia) which we still possess, was written by 
PoMPONius Mela, of Tingentera in Spain. Like Curtius he has obvi- 
ously imitated Seneca; his account is too concise, but he intended 
and perhaps carried out elsewhere a fuller treatment of the subject. 

The two studies which despotism had done so much to destroy, 
oratory and jurisprudence, still found a few votaries. The chief 
field for speaking was the senate, where men like Crispus, Eprius 
Marcellus, and Suillius the accuser of Seneca, exercised their 
genius in adroit flattery. Thrasea, Helvidius, and the opposition, 
were compelled to study repression rather than fulness. As jurists 
we hear of few eminent names : Proculus and Cassius Longinus 
are the hiost prominent. 

Grammar was successfully cultivated by Valerius Probus, who 
undertook the critical revision of the texts of the Latin classics, 
much as the Alexandrine grammarians had done for those of 
Greece. He was originally destined for public life, but through 
want of success betook himself to study. After his arrival at 
Eome he gave public lectures on philology, which were numerously 
attended, and he seems to have retained the affection of all his 
pupils. His oral notes were afterwards edited in an epistolary 
form. The work De Notis Antiquis, or at least a portion of it, 
De luris Notis, has come down to us in a slightly abridged form ; 
also a short treatise called Catliolica, treating of the noun and 
verb, though it is uncertain whether this is authentic. ^ Another 
w ■)Yk on grammar is attributed to him, but as it is evidently at 
least three centuries later than this date, several critics have sup- 
pers 9d it to be by a second Probus, also a grammarian, who hved 
at that period. 

We shall conclude the chapter with a notice of an extraordinary 
book, the Satires, which pass under the name of Petronius 
Arbiter. Who he was is not certainly known ; but there was a 
Petronius in the time of iJ^ero, whose death {%Q A.D.), is recorded 

1 On the^^ro Milonc, 2yro Scauro, pro Cornclio, inPisonem, in toga Candida, 
^ Scholia Bohbicnsia. 

^ It is kleutical with the second hctok of Sacerdos, who lived at the close 
of the third ceutuiy. 



PETRONIUS. 395 

by Tacitus,^ and who is generally identified witli him. This 
account has often been quoted; nevertheless we may insert it 
here : " His days were passed in sleep, his nights in business and 
enjoyment. As others rise to fame by industry, so he by idleness ; 
and he gained the reputation, not like most spendthrifts of a 
profligate or glutton, but of a cultured epicure. His words and 
deeds were welcomed as models of graceful simplicity in proportion 
as they were morally lax and ostentatiously indifferent to appear- 
ances. While proconsul, however, in Bithynia he showed himseK 
vigorous and equal to affairs. Then turning to vice, or perhaps 
simulating it, he became a chosen intimate of JSTero, and his prime 
authority (arbiter) in all matters of taste, so that he thought 
nothing delicate or charming except what Petronius had approved. 
This raised the envy of Tigellinus, who regarded him as a rival 
purveyor of pleasure preferred to himself. Consequently he traded 
on the cruelty of I^Tero, a vice to which all others gave place, by 
accusing Petronius of being a friend to Scaevinus, having bribed a 
slave to give the information, and removed the means of defence 
by hurrying almost all Petronius's slaves into prison. Caesar was 
then in Campania, and Petronius, who had gone to Cumae, was 
arrested there. He determined not to endure the suspense of hope 
and fear. Eut he did not hurry out of life ; he opened his veins 
gently, and binding them up from time to time, chatted with his 
friends, not on serious topics or such as might procure him the fame 
of constancy, nor did he Hsten to any conversation on immortahty 
or the doctrines of philosophers, but only to light verses on easy 
themes. Pie pensioned some of his slaves, chastised others. He 
feasted and lay do^vii to rest, that his compulsory death might 
seem a natural one. In his will he did not, like most of the 
condemned, flatter ISTero, or Tigellinus, or any of the powerful, but 
satirized the emperor's vices under the names of effeminate youths 
and women, giving a description of each new kind of debauchery. 
These he sealed and sent to I^ero." Many have thought that in 
the Satires we possess the very writing to which Tacitus refers. 
But to this it is a sufficient answer that they consisted of six- 
teen books, far too many to have been written in two days. They 
must have been prepared before, and perhaps the most caustic 
of them were selected for the emperor's perusal. The fragment 
that remains is from the fifteenth and sixteenth books, and is a 
mixture of verse and prose in excellent Latinity, but deplorably 
and offensively obscene. Nothing can give a meaner idea of the 
social cxilture of Eome than this production of one of her most 

* Ann. xvi. 18. 



S96 HISTOEY OF IIOMAN LITERATURE. 

accomplisTied masters of self-indulgence. As, however, it is ini- 
portant from a literary, and still more from an antiquarian point 
of view, we add a short analysis of its contents. 

The hero is one Encolpius, who begins by bewailing to a rhetor 
named Agamemnon the decline of native eloquence, which his 
friend admits, and ascribes to the general laxity of education. 
Wliile the question is under discussion Encolpius is interrupted 
and carried off through a variety of adventures, of which suffice it 
to say that they are best left in obscurity, being neither humorous 
nor moral. Another day, he is invited to dine with the rich 
freedman Trimalchio, under whom, doubtless, some court favourite 
of 'Ngto is shadowed forth. The banquet and conversation are 
described with great vividness. After some preliminary compli- 
ments, the host, eager to display his learning, turns the discourse 
upon philology ; but he is suddenly called away, and topics of more 
general interest are introduced, the guests giving their opinions 
on each in a sufficiently interesting way. The remarks of one 
Ganymedes on the sufferings of the lower classes, the insufficiency 
of food, and the lack of healthy industries, are pathetic and true. 
Meanwhile, Trimalchio returns, orders a boar to be killed and 
cooked, and while this is in preparation entertains his friends with 
discussions on rhetoric, medicine, history, art, &c. The scene 
becomes animated as the wine flows ; various ludicrous incidents 
ensue, which are greeted Avith extemporaneous epigrams in verse, 
some rather amusing, others flat and diffuse. The conversation 
thus turns to the subject of poetry. Cicero and Syrus are com- 
pared with some ability of illustration. Jests are freely bandied ; 
ghost stories are proposed, and two marvellous fables related, one 
on the power of owls to predict events, the other on a soldier who 
was changed into a wolf. The supernatural is then about to be 
discussed, when a gentleman named Habinnas and his portly wife 
Scintilla come in. This lady exhibits her jewels with much com- 
placency, and Trimalchio's wife Fortunata, roused to competition, 
does tiie same. Trimalchio has now arrived at that stage of the 
evening's entertainment when mournful views of life begin to 
present themselves. He calls for the necessary documents, and 
forthwith proceeds to make his will. His kind provision for his 
relatives and dependants, combined with his after-dinner pathos, 
bring out the softer side of the company's feelings ;^ every one 
weeps, and for a time festivities are suspended. The terrible 
insecurity of life under ^NTero is here pointedly hinted at. 

The w^ill read, Trimalchio takes a bath, and soon returns in 
excellent spirits, ready to dine again. At this his good iady takes 
umbrage, and something very hke a quarrel ensues, on which 



PETROKIUS. 397 

Trimalcliio bids tlie musicians stril^e up a dead marcli. The tumult 
with which this is greeted is too much for many of the guests. 
Encolpius, the narrator, leaves the room, and the party breaks up. 
Encolpius on leaving Trimalchio's meets a poet, Eumolpus, who 
complains bitterly of poverty and neglect. A debate ensues on 
the causes of the decKne in painting and the arts ; it is attributed 
to the love of money. A picture representing the sack of Troy 
gives occasion for a mock-tragic poem of some length, doubtless 
aimed at ISTero's effusions. The poet is pelted as a bore, and has 
to decamp in haste. Eut he is incorrigible. He returns, and this 
time brings a still longer and more pretentious poem. Some 
applaud ; others disapprove. Encolpius, seized Avith a fit of 
melancholy, thinks of hanging himself, but is persuaded to live 
by the artless caresses of a fair boy whom he has loved. Several 
adventures of a similar kind follow, and the book, which towards 
the end becomes very fragmentary, ends without any regular con- 
clusion. Enough has been given to show its general character. 
It is something between a jNIenippean satire and a Milesian facie, 
such as had been translated from the Greek long before by Sisenna, 
and were to be so successfully imitated in a later age by Apuleius. 
The narrative goes on from incident to incident without any par- 
ticular connexion, and allows all kinds of digressions. Poetical 
insertions are very frequent, some original, others quoted, many of 
considerable elegance. Erom its central and by many degrees most 
entertaining incident the whole satire has been called The Siqyj^er 
of Trimalcliio. We have a few short passages remaining from the 
lost books, and some allusions in these we possess enable us to 
reconstruct to some extent their argument. It does not seem to 
have contained anything specially attractive. If only the book 
were less offensive, its varied literary scope and polished conversa- 
tional style would make it tnily interesting. As it is, the student 
of ancient manners finds it a mine of important and out-of-the-way 
information. 



APPENDIX. 

KoTE I. — The Testamentum Porcelli. 

Connected with the Milesian fables j it, snys (contra Eufinum, i. 17, p. 
■were the Testanientum Porcelli, ; 473) ^' Quasi non cirratorum turla 
short jcax cVes'prit, generally in the j Milcsiarum in scholis fgmcnta dc- 
lorni of comic anecdotes, as a rule ] cantct ct tcstamcntum suis Bcssoruin 
licentious, but sometimes harmless, | cachinno membra conciUint, afgue 
and intended for children. A speci- I inter scnrrarum cpnJas nugae isiius* 
men of the unobjectionable sort is j modi frequenteniur. 
here given. St Jerome, who quotes ! 



398 



HISTOEY OF liOMAN LITERATURE. 



** Testamentum PorceUi. 

'* Inct^iit testamentum porcelli. 

*' M. Grunnius Corocotta porcellus 
testamentum fecit ; quoniam manu 
niea scribere iioti potui, scribendum 
dictavi. Magirus cocus dixit 'veni 
hue, eversor domi, solivertiator, fugi- 
tive porcelle, et liodie tibi dirimo 
vitam.' Corocotta porcellus dixit 
' si qua feci, si qua peccavi, si qua 
vascella pedibus meis confregi, rogo, 
domine coa, vitam peto, concede 
roganti,' Magirus cocus dixit 'transi, 
puer affer mihi de cocina cultrum, ut 
hunc porcellum faciam cruentum.' 
Porcellus comprelienditur a famulis, 
ductus sub die xvi. kal. lucerninas, 
ubi abundant cymae, Clibanato et 
Piperato consulibus, et ut vidit se 
moriturum esse, horae spatium petiit 
et cocum rogavit ut testamentum 
facere posset, clamavit ad se suos 
parentes, ut de cibariis suis aliquid 
dimitteret eis. Quid ait: 

" ' Patri meo Verrino Lardino do 
lego dari glandis modios xxx. et 
matri meae Veturinae Scrofae do 
lego dari Laconicae siliginis modios 
xl. et sorori meae Quirinae, in cuius 
votum interesse non potui, do lego 
dari hordei modios xxx. et de meis 
visceribus dabo douabo sutoribus 
saetas, rixoribus capitinas, surdis 
auriculas, causidicis et verbosis 
linguam, bubulariis intestina, isici- 
ariis femora, mulieribus lumbulos, 
pueris vesicam, puellis caudam, cin- 
aedis musculos, cursoribus et vena- 
toribus talos, latronibus ungulas, et 
nee nominando coco legato dimitto 
popiam et pistillum, quae mecum 
attuleram : de Tebeste usque ad Ter- 
geste liget sibi eollo de reste, et 
volo mihi fieri monumentum aureis 
litteris scriptum:' M. Grunnius 



Corocotta porcellus vixit annia 
DCCCC-XC-VIIIIS. quod si semis- 
sem vixisset, mille annos implesset, 
'optimi amatores mei vel consules 
vitae, rogo vos ut cum corpore meo 
bene faciatis, bene condiatis de bonis 
coudimeutis nuclei, piperis et mellis, 
ut nomeu meum in sempiternum 
nominetur, mei domini vel conso- 
brini mei, qui in medio testamento 
inter fuistis, iubete signari.' 

*' Lardio signavit, Ofellicus sig- 
navit, Cyminatus signavit, Tergillus 
signavit, Celsinus signavit, Nuptiali- 
sus signavit. 

" P^xplicit testamentum porcelli 
sub die xvi. kal. lucerninas Clibanato 
et Piperato consulibus feliciter." 

Such ridiculous compositions were 
extremely popular in court circles 
during the corrupter perioils of the 
Empire. Suetomus (Tib. 42) tells us 
that Tiberius gave one Asellius 
Sabinus £1400 for a dialogue in 
which the mushroom, the beeca- 
ficoe, the oyster, and the thrush 
advanced their respective claims to 
be considered the prince of delicacies. 
To this age also belong the collec- 
tion of epigrams on Piiapus called 
Friapea, and including many poems 
attributed to Virgil, Tibullus, and 
Ovid. They are mostly of an obscene 
character, but some few, especially 
those by Tibullus aud Catullus which 
close the series, are simple and pretty. 
It is almost inconceivable to us how 
so disgusting a cultus could have 
been joined with innocence of life ; 
but as Priapus long maintained his 
place as a rustic deity we must sup- 
pose that the hideous literalism of 
his surroundings must have been got 
over by ingenious allegorising, or for- 
gotten by rustic veneration. 



Note 2. — Oro the MS. of Petronius. 

From Thomson's Essay on the Post- Augustan Latin Poets, from the 
Uncyclopcedia Metropolitana {Roman Literahcre). 



Fragments of Petronius had been 
printed by Bernardinus de Vitalibus 
at Venice in 1499, and by Jacobus 
Thauner at Leipsig in 1500 ; but in 



the year 1652, Petrus Petitus, or as he 
styled himself, Marinus Statilius, a 
literary Dalmatian, discovered at Traw 
a MS. containing a much more con- 



MS. OF PETEONIUS. 



399 



sideraWe frairment, which was after- 
wards published at Padua and Ara- 
stenlam, and ultimately purchased at 
Kome for the library of the King of 
France in the year 1703. The eminent 
Mr J. B. Gail, one of the curators of 
this library, politely allowed M. 
Guerard, a young gentleman of 
considerable learning employed in 
the MS. department, to atiord us 
the following circumstantial infor- 
mation respecting this valuable 
codex, classed in the library as 
79S9 : — "It is a small folio two 
fingers thick, written on very sub- 
stantial paper, and in a very 
legible hand. The titles are in Ver- 
million ; the beginnings of the chap- 
ters, &c. are also in vermillion or 
blue. It contains the poems of Ti- 
bullus, Propertius ':nd Catullus, as 
we have tliera in the ordinary printed 
editions ; then ajipears the date 
of the 20th Ifov. 1423. After 
these comes the letter of Sappho, 
and then the work of Petronius. 
The extracts are entitled 'Petronii 
Arbitri satyri fragmenta et libro 
quinto decimo et sexto decimo,' and 
begin thus: 'cum (not 'num,' as 
in the printed copies) in alio genere 
furiarum declamatores inquietantur,' 
&c. After these fragments, which 
occupy twenty-one pages of the 
MS. we have a piece without 
title or mention of its author, 
which is The Snjyper of Trimalcio. 
It begins thus : ' Venerat iam ter- 



tius dies," and ends with the words. 
' tarn plane quam ex incendio fugi- 
mus.' This piece is complete by it- 
self, and does not recur in the other 
extracts. Then follows the Ilorctum, 
attributed to Virgil, and afterwards 
the Phoenix oi Claudian. The latter 
piece is in the character of the 
seventeenth century, while the rest 
of the MS. is in that of the fifteenth." 
The publication of this fragment ex- 
cited a great sensation among the 
learned, to great numbers of whom 
the original was submitted, and by 
far the majority of the judges de- 
cided in favour of its antiquity. 
Strong as was this external evidence, 
the internal is yet more valuable; 
since it is scarcely possible to con- 
ceive a foigery of this length, wdiich 
would not in some poiiit or other 
betray itself. The difficulty of forg- 
ing a work like the Satyric.on will 
better appear, when it is considered 
that such attempts have been actu- 
ally made. A Frenchman, named 
ISTodot, pretended that the entire 
work of Petronius had been found at 
Belgrade in the siege of that town ia 
1688. The forged MS. was pub- 
lished; but the contempt it excited 
was no less universal than the con- 
sideration which was shown to the 
MS, of Statilius. Another French- 
man, Lallemand, printed a pretended 
fragm.ent, with notes and a transla- 
tion, in 1800, but no one was de- 
ceived by it. 



CHAPTEE T. 

The Eeigns of the Flavian Emperotis (a.d. 69-96). 

1. Prose Writers. 

With tlie extinction of the Claiidian dynasty we enter on a new 
literary epoch. The reigns of Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian pro- 
duced a series of writers who all show the same characteristics, 
though necessarily modified by tlie tyranny of Domitian's reign 
as contrasted with, the clemency of those of his two predecessors. 
Under Vespasian and Titus authors might say what they chose ; 
both these princes disdained to curb freedom of speech or to 
punish it even when it clamoured for martyrdom. Yet such was 
the reaction from the excitement of the last epoch, that no writer 
of genius appeared, and only one of the first eminence in learning. 
There now comes into Eoman literature an unmistakable evidence 
of reduced talent as well as of decayed taste. Hitherto power at 
least has not been wanting ; but for the future all is on a weaker 
scale. Only the two great names of Juvenal and Tacitus redeem, 
the ninth century of Eoine from total want of creative genius. 
All other writers move in established grooves, and, as a rule, 
imitate or feebly rival some of the giants of the past. Learning 
was still cultivated with assiduity if not with enthusiasm ; but 
the grand hopeful spirit, sure of discovering truth, which animates 
the erudition of a better age, has now given place to a querulous 
depreciation even of the labour to which the authors have devoted 
their lives. This is conspicuous from the first in the otherwise 
noble pages of the elder Pliny, and is the secret of that want of 
critical insight Avhich, in a mind so capaciously stored, strikes us 
at first as inexplicable. 

This laborious and interesting writer was born at Como^ in 
the year 23 a.d. He came, it is not known exactly wheu, to 
Eome and studied under the rhetorical grammarian Apion, whom 

^ Suetonius calls hira Kovocornensis. He himself speaks of Catullus as 
his own conterrancus, from which it has been iiiferred by some that he waa 
born at Verona (N. H. Praef. ). His lull name is C. Pliuius SecuiMus. 



PLINY THE ELDER. 401 

Tibeniis in moclvcry of liis sounding periods had called "the drum " 
(tympanum). Till his forty-sixth year Pliny's genius remained 
unknown. An allusion in his work to Lollia Paidina has given 
rise to the opinion that he was admitted to the court of Caligula, 
but the grounds for this conclusion are manifestly insufficient. 
His nephew states that he composed his treatise On Douhtfid 
Words'^ to escape the jealousy of ^ero, who suspected him of less 
unambitious pursuits. Eut the evidence of the younger Pliny serves 
better to establish facts than motives ; he is always anxious to swell 
the importance of his friends ; and it is far more likely from Pliny's 
own silence that he remained in comparative obscurity until Xero's 
death. At the age of twenty-two he served his first campaign in 
Africa, and soon after in Germany under Lucius Pomponius, who 
gave him a cavalry troop, and seems to have befriended him in 
various other ways. liis promotion was perhaps due to the 
treatise On Javelin-iliroidnrf- which he wrote about this time. He 
showed his gratitude towards Pomponius at a later date by 
writing his life. 

Pliny had ahvays felt a strong interest in science, and deter- 
mined as soon as opportunity offered to make its advancement the 
object of his life. With this end in view he made careful observa- 
tions of all the countries he visited, and used his military position 
to secure information that otherwise might have been hard to 
obtain. He inspected the source of the Danube and travelled 
among the Cliauci on the shores of the German Ocean. He 
visited the mouths of the Eber and "Weser, the K'orth Sea and the 
Cimbrian Chersonese, and spent some time among the Eoman 
provinces west of the Eliine. While in Germany he had a 
vision in which he saw or thought he saw the shade of Drusus, 
which appeared to him by night and bade him tell the history of 
all the German wars. Accordingly, he collected materials with 
industry, and worked them up into a large volume, which is now 
unfortunately lost. At twenty-nine he left the army and returned 
to Pome, where he studied for the bar. But his talents were not 
suitable for forensic display, and he found a more lucrative field 
in teaching grammar and rhetoric. At what time he was sent, 
out as procurator to Spain is uncertain, but when he returned he 
found Vespasian on the throne. Pliny, Avho had known him in 
Germany, and had been on intimate terms with his son Titus, 
was now received with the greatest favour. Every morning before 
day-break, when the l^usy Emperor rose to finish his correspond- 
ence before the work of the day began, ho called Pliny to his side, 

^ Bv.hii iiermonis, sometimes named Dc BiJ/icilibus Liiujuae Lailnac. 
^ Be lacidaticnc Equestri. 

2 



402 HISTORY or EOMAN LITERATURE. 

and the two friends cliatted awhile together in the plain, homely 
fashion that Vespasian much preferred to the measured style of 
court etiquette. JN'or was his favour confined to familiar inter- 
course. He made him admiral of the fleet stationed at Misenum 
and charged with guarding the Mediterranean ports. It was while 
here that news was brought him of the eruption of Vesuvius. 
He sailed to Eesina determined to investigate the phenomenon, 
and, as his nephew in a well-known letter tells us, paid the price 
of his scientific curiosity with his life. The letter is so charm- 
ing, and affords so good an example of Pliny the younger's stylo, 
that we may be excused for inserting it here.^ 

'* He was at Misenum in command of the fleet. On tlie 24th August 
(79 A.D.), about 1 P.M., my mother pointed out to him a cloud of unusual 
size and shape. He had then sunned himself, had his cold bath, tasted 
some food, and was lying down reading. He at once asked for his shoes, 
and mounted a height from Avhich the best view might be obtained. The 
cloud was rising from a mountain afterwards ascertained to have been 
Vesuvius ; its form was more like a pine-tree than anything else. It was 
raised into the air by wliat seemed its trunk, and then branched out in 
different directions ; the- reason probably was that the blast, at first irresis- 
tible, but afterwards losing strength or unable to counteract gravity, spent 
itself by spreading out on either side. The cloud was either bright, or dark 
and spotty, according as earth or ashes were thrown up. As a man of 
science he determined tu inspect the phenomenon more closely. He ordered 
a light vessel to be pi-epared, and offered to take me with him. I replied that 
I would rather study ; as it happened, he himself had set me something to 
write. He was just starting when a letter was brought from Kectina 
imploring aid for Nascus who was in imminent danger ; his villa lay 
below, and no escape was possible except by sea. He now changed his 
plan, and what he had begun from scientific enthusiasm he carried out 
with self-sacrificing courage. He launched some quadriremes, and em- 
barked with the intention of succouring not only Rectina but others who 
lived on that populous and picturesque coast. Thus he hurried to the 
spot from which all others were flying, and steered straight for the danger, 
so absolutely devoid of fear that he dictated an account with full comments 
of all the movements and changing shapes of the phenomenon, each as it 
presented itself. Ashes were now falling on the decks, and became hotter 
and denser as the vessel approached. Scorched and blackened pumice- 
stones and bits of rock split by fire were mingled with them. The sea 
suddenly became shallow, and fragments from the mountain filled the coast 
seeming to bar all further progress. He hesitated whether to return ; but 
on the master strongly advising it, he cried, ' Fortune favours the brave : 
make for Pomponianus's house.' This was at Stabiae, and was cut off from 
the coast near Vesuvius by an inlet, which had been gradually scooped out 
by encroachments of the sea. The owner was in sight, intending, should 
the danger (which was visible, but not immediate) approach so near as to be 
urgent, to escape by ship. For this purpose he had embarked all his effects 
and was waiting for a change of wind. My uncle, whom the loreeze 
favoured, soon reached him, and, embracing him with much affection, tried 

1 Ep. vi. 16. 



PLINY THE ELDER. 403 

to console his fears. To show his own unconcern he caused himself to be 
carried to a bath; and having washed, sat down to dinner with cheerfulness 
or (what is equally creditable to him) with the appearance of it. ]\lean\vliile 
from many parts of the mountain broad flames burst forth ; the blaze shone 
back from the sky, and a dark night enhanced the lurid glare. To sootho 
his friu'nd's terror he declared that what they saw was only the dese.ted 
villages which the inhabitants in their flight had set on fire. Then he 
retired to rest, and there can be no doubt that he slept, since the sound of 
his breathing (which a broad chest made deep and resonant), was clearly 
heard b}' those watching at the door. Soon the courfr which led to the 
chamber was so choked with cinders and stones that longer delay would 
have made escape impossible. He was aroused from sleep, and went to 
Pomponiaaus and the rest who had sat up all night. They debated Avh ether 
to stay indoors or to wander about in the open. For on the one hand constant 
shocks of earthquake made the houses rock to and fro, and loosened their 
foundations ; while on the other, the open air was rendered dangerous by the 
foil of pumice-stones, though these Avere light and very porous. On the whola 
they preferred the open air, but what to the rest had been a weighing of 
fears had to him been a balancing of reasons. They tied cushions over their 
heads to guard them from the falling stones. Though it was now day elsewhere 
it was here darker than the darkest night, though the gloom was broken by 
torches and other lights. They next walked to the sea to try whether it 
"would admit of vessels being launched, but it was still a waste of raging 
waters. He then spread a linen cloth, and, reclining on it, asked several 
times for water, which he drank ; soon, however, the flames and that sul- 
phurous vapour which preceded them put his companions to flight and com- 
pelled him to arise. He rose by the help of two slaves, but immediately 
fell down dead. His death no doubt arose from sufl"ocation by the dense 
vapour, as well as from an obstruction of his stomach, a part which had been 
always weak and liable to inflammation and other discomforts. When day- 
light returned, i.e. after three days, his body was found entire, just as 
it was, covered with the clothes in which he had died ; his appearance 
was that of sleep rather than of death." 

This interesting letter, which, was sent to Tacitus for inser- 
tion in his history, gives a fine description of the erii23tion. 
Another, still more graphic, is given in a later letter of the same 
book.i A third 2 informs us of the extraordinary studiousness 
and economy of time practised by the philosopher, which enabled 
him in a life by no means long to combine a very active business 
career mth an amount of reading and writing only second to that 
of Yarro. Pliny's admiration for his uncle's unwearied diligence 
makes liim delight to dwell on these particulars : 

"After the Vulcanalia (the 23d of August) he always began work at dead 
of night, in winter at 1 a.m., never later than 2 a.m., often at midnight. 
He was most sparing of sleep ; at times it would catch him unawares while 
studying. After his interview with Vespasian was over, he went to busi- 
ness, then to study for the rest of the day. After a light meal, which like 
our ancestors he ate b} day, he would in summer, if he hail any leisure, lie 
in the sun, while some one read to him and he made notes or extracts, 

1 Plin. vi. 20. = lb. iii. 5. 



404 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

He ncTPr read without Tnaldng extracts; no book, he said, was so had hut that 
something might be gained from it. After sunning himself he would take a 
cohi bath, then a little food, then a short nap. Then, as if it wei e a new 
day, he studied till supper. During this meal a book was read, he all the 
■while making notes. I remember once, when the reader mispronounced a 
word, that one of our friends compelled him to repeat it. My uncle asked 
him if he liad not understood the word. On his replying, yes, n)y uncle 
said sharply, ' Then why did you interrupt him ? we have lost more than ten 
lines ; ' so frugal was he of his time. He rose from supper before dark ia 
summer, before 7 P.M. in winter; and this habit was law to him. Such was his 
life in town ; but in the country his one and only interruption from study 
was the bath. I mean the actual hatliing ; for while he was being rubbed he 
always either dictated, or listened to reading. On a journey, having noth- 
ing else to do, he gave himself wholly to study ; at his side was an amanu- 
ensis, who in winter wore gloves, that his master's work m.ight not be in- 
terrupted by the cold. Even in Rome he always travelled in a sedan. I 
remember his chiding me for taking a walk, saying, " you might have saved 
those hours" — for every moment not given to study he thought lost time. 
By this application he contrived to compose that vast array of volumes 
which we possess, besides bequeathing to me 160 rolls of selected notes, 
each roll written on both sides and in the smallest possible hand, which 
practically doubles their number. To call myself studious with his example 
before me is absurd ; compared with him, I am an idle vagabond." 

In the earlier part of this letter, Pliny gives a list of his nncle's 
works. Besides those mentioned in the text, we find a treatise 
on eloquence called Stuch'osus, and a continuation of the history 
of Autidiiis Bassus in thirty books, dedicated to the emperor 
Titus. The Natural History^ in thirty-seven books, is the sole 
monument of Pliny's industry that has descended to us. The 
fortunes of this portentous work have greatly varied ; while in 
the Middle Ages it was reverenced as a kind of encyclopaedia of 
all secular knowledge, in our own day, except to antiquarians, it 
is an unknown book. Many who know Virgil almost by heart 
have never read through its tiresome and conceited preface. Yet 
there is an immensity of interesting matter discussed in the work. 
Independently of its vast learning, for it contains, according to 
its author's statement, twenty thousand facts, and excerpts or 
redactions from two thousand books or treatises, its range of 
subjects is such as to include something attractive to every taste. 
Strictly speaking, many topics enter which do not belong to 
natural history at all, e.g., the account of the use made of natural 
substances in the applied sciences and the useful or fine arts ; but 
as these are decidedly the best-written parts of the work, and full 
of chatty, pleasant anecdotes, we should be much worse off if 
they had been omitted. The confused arrangement also, which 
mars its utility as a compendium of knowledge, may be due in 
great measure to the indefinite state of science at the time, to the 
gaps in its affinities which the discovery of so many new sciences 



PLINY THE ELDER. 405 

has helped to fill up, and the consequent mingling together of 
branches which are separate and distinct. 

It is questionable whether Pliny ever had any originality. If 
he had, it was stamped out long before he began his book by the 
weight of his cumbrous erudition. He cannot compare his mate- 
rials, nor select them, nor analyse them, nor make them explain 
themselves by lucid arrangement. jSTor has his review of human 
knowledge taught him the great truth that science is progressive, 
that each age corrects the errors of the past, and prepares tlie way 
for the improvements of the next. Seneca, with all liia affected 
contempt for science, learnt the lesson of it better than Pliny. 
He has in the first place no fixed canon of truth. One thing does 
not seem to him more probable than another. A statement has 
only to come forward under the testimony of a respectable ancient, 
ancl it is at once put down as a fact. Here, however, we must 
make a distinction, for fear of invalidating Pliny's authority beyond 
\vliat is just. It is only in strictly scientific matters that this 
credulity and lack of penetration is found. Where he deals with 
historical, biographical, or agricultural questions, he is a com- 
petent, and for the most part trustAVorthy, compiler. His work is 
a most valuable storehouse for the antiquarian or historian of 
ancient literature or art, and generally for the current opinions 
on nearly every topic. Though genuinely devoted to learning, he 
has still enough of the " old Adam " of rhetoric about him to 
complain of the dryness of liis material, and its unsuitableness for 
ornamental treatment ; but this cannot surprise us, when we re- 
member that even Tacitus with infinitely less reason bewailed the 
monotony of the events he had taken upon him to record. 

What partly accounts for Pliny's uncritical credulity is the 
unsatisfactory theory of the universe which he adopts, and with 
commendable candour sets before us at the outset, i He is a ma- 
terialistic pantheist. The world is for him deity, self-created and 
eternal, incomprehensible by man, moving ceaselessly without 
reference to him. So far there is nothing unscientific, except the 
hypothesis of self-creation ; but he goes on to imply that the laws 
of its action, being incomprehensil)le, need not be regular, at any 
rate, as we consider regularity. The things which militate against 
our experience may be the result of other laws, or of chance con- 
tingencies of which no account can be given. Hence he never 
rejects a fact on the ground of its bcdng marvellous. The most 
ludicrous and inconceivable monstrosities find an easy place in 
his system. He does not attach any superstitious meaning to 

1 rUri. N. H. ii. 1. 



'^^^ HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

them; on tlie contrarj, he ridicules the idea that omens or por- 
tents are sent by the gods, but he has no touchstone by which to 
test the rare but possible results of real experience as distiuPiiished 
Irom the figments of the imagination or ordinary trayellers' stories. 
In the zoological part he gives the reins to his love of the marvel- 
lous; aU kinds of absurdities are narrated with the utmost 
gravity ; and his accounts descended through the mediaeval period 
as the accredited authority on the subject. In the literature of 
Frester John will be seen many a reflection from the writiucrs of 
Plmy; m the fables of the Arabian Nights many more, with 
characteristic additions equaUy creditable to human weakness or 
ingenuity. It is truly lamentable to reflect that while the rational 
and on the whole truthful descriptions of Aristotle andTheophrastus 
were extant and accessible, Pliny's nonsense should in preference 
have gained the ear of mankind. 

As a stylist Pliny recaUs two very different writers, Seneca and 
uato. In tliose parts where he speaks as a moralist (and they are 
extremely numerous), he strives to reproduce the point of Seneca • 
in those where he treats of husbandry, which are perhaps the most 
naturally written in the work, his stern brevity often recaUs the 
old censor. Like Seneca, he considers physical science as food for 
edihcation; continually he deserts his theme to preach a sermon 
on the folly or ignorance of mankind. And like Cato he is never 
weary of extolling the wisdom and virtues of the harsh infancy of 
the Eepubhc, and blaming the degeneracy of its feeble and 
luxui^ious descendants who refuse to till the soil, and add acre to 
acre of their overgrown estates. 

Pliny has a strong vein of satire, and its effect is increased by 
a certain sententious quaintness which gives a racy flavour to 
many otherwise dull enumerations of facts. Eut his satire is not 
ot a pleasing type; it is buHt too much on despair of his kind • 
his whole view of the universe is querulous, and shows a mind 
unequal to cope with the knowledge it has acquired. 

He was considered the most learned man of his day, and with 
reason. He at least knew the value of first-hand acquaintance 
with the original authorities, instead of drawing a superficial 
culture from manuals and abridgments, or worse still, the empty 
declamations of the rhetorical schools. And after all it is his a-e 
which must bear the blame of his failure rather than himse&. 
±or while he was not great enough to rise above his surroundin^rs 
and investigate, compare, and conclude on a method planned by 
himself, he was just the man who would have profited to the fuU 
by being trained in a sound public system of education, and 
perhaps, had he lived in the Ciceronian period, would have risen 



QUINTILIAN. 407 

to a mucli higher place as a permanent contributor to the journal 
of human knowledge. 

Among the j^ounger contemporaries of Pliny, the most cele- 
brated is M. Fabius Quintilianus (35-95 a.d.),i a native of Cala- 
g-urris in Spain, but educated in Eome, and long established there 
as a popular and influential public professor of eloquence. He was 
intrusted by Domitian with the education of his two grand- 
nephews, an honour to which he ow^ed his subsequent elevation to 
the consulship. His time had been so fully occupied with lectur- 
ing as to allow no leisure for publishing anything until the closing 
years of his career. This gave him the great advantage of being 
a ripe writer before he challenged the judgment of the world ; 
and, in truth, Quintilian's knowledge and love of his subject are 
thorough in the highest degree. His first essay was a treatise on 
the causes of the decay of eloquence,^ and the last (which we still 
possess) a Avork in twelve books on the complete training of an 
orator.^ This celebrated work, to which Quintilian devoted the 
assiduous labour of two whole years, interrupted only by the 
lessons given to his royal pupils, represents the maturest treat- 
ment of the subject which w^e possess. The author was modest 
enough to express a strong unwillingness to write it, either fearing 
to come forward as an author so late in life, or judging the ground 
preoccupied already. However, it was produced at last, and no 
sooner known than it at once assumed the high position that has 
been accorded to it ever since. The treatment is exhaustive; as 
much more thorough than the popular treatises of Cicero as it is 
more attractive than the purely technical one of Cornificius. At 
the same time it has the defects inseparable from the unreal age in 
which its author lived. While minutely providing for all the future 
orator's formal requirements, it omits the material one without which 
the finished rhetorician is but a tinkling cymbal, how to think as 
an orator. ]^o one knew better than Quintilian that this comes 
from zest in life, not from rules of art. There will be more 
stimulus given to one who pants for distinction in the delightfuJ 
pages of Cicero's Brutus, than in all that Quintilian and such as he 
ever wrote or ever will write. But this is not the fault of the man ; 
as a formal rhetorician of good principle, sound orthodoxy, and love 
for his art, Quintilian stands high in the list of classical authoi-s. 

He begms his orator's training from the cradle. He rightly 

1 Some have supposed that he lived much later, till 118 A.D., hut this is 
improbahle. 

^ Referred to in the prooeminm to Book VI. Some have thoug'ht ft the 
work we possess, and which is usually ascribed to Tacitus, but without. reason. 

^ De Institatione Oratoria. 



408 HISTOPtY OF EOMAN LITEKxVTURE. 

ascribes tlie greatest importance to early impressions, even the 
very earliest ; illustrating his position by the inlliience of Cornelia 
who trained her sons to eloquence from childhood, and other 
similar cases known to Eonian history. A good nurse must be 
selected ; an eloquent one would, doubtless, be hard to find. The 
boy who is destined to greatness has now outgrown the nursery, 
and the great question arises, Is he to be sent to school ? "With 
the Eomans as with us this difficulty admitted of two solutions. 
The lad might be educated at home under tutors, or he might bo 
sent to learn the world at a public school. Those who at the 
present day shrink from sending their children to school generally 
profess to base their unwillingness on a fear lest the iniiuence of 
bad example may corrupt the purity of youth ; Quintilian on the 
very same ground, strongly recommends a parent to send his son 
to school. By this means, he says, Ms tender ijears will he saved 
from the daily contamination lohich the scenes of home life afford. 
A sad commentary on the state of Eoman society and the per- 
nicious effects of slave-labour ! 

After school, the youth is to attend the lectures of a rhetorician. 
This is of course a -matter of great importance, and in the second 
book the writer handles its various bearings with excellent judg- 
ment. Having described the duties of "the professor and his 
pupil, and the various tasks which will be gone through, he 
proceeds in the next book to discuss the different departments of 
oratory. In this great subject he follows Aristotle, here, as always, 
going back to the most established authorities, and adapting them 
with signal tact to the changed requirements of a later age and a 
different nation. The points connected with this, the central 
theme of the treatise, carry us through the five next books. They 
are the most technical in the work, and not adapted for general 
reading. The eighth begins the interesting topic of style, which 
is continued in the ninth, where trope, metaphor, amplification, 
and other ^%2mje oratioiiis are illustrated at length. Througliout 
these books there are a large number of quotations, and continual 
references to the practice of celebrated masters in the art, besides 
frequent introduction of passages from the poets and hist6rians. 
But it is in the tenth book that these are concentrated into one- 
focus. To acquire a "firm facility" (I^l^) of speech it is neces- 
sary to have read widely and with discernment. This leads him 
to enumerate the Greek and Eoman authors Hkely to be most 
useful to an orator. The criticisms he offers on the salient quali- 
ties of almost all the great classics may seem ■ to us trite and 
common-place. They certainly are not remarkable for brilHancy, 
but they are just and sober, and have stood the test of ages, and 



QUINTILIAN. 409 

perhaps their apparent dulness results from their having been 
always familiar words. Their utility to the student of literatuj;e 
is so considerable, that we have thought it worth while to append 
a translation of them to the present chapter.^ 

The eleventh book chiefly turns on memory, which the Romans 
cultivated with extreme diligence, and several remarkable instances 
of which have been noticed in the course of this work. It was to 
them a much more vital excellence than to us, who have adopted 
the practice of using rough notes or other assistance to it. Delivery, 
too, is in the elventh book fully discussed ; and these chapters will 
be read with interest as showing the extreme and minute care be- 
estowed by the Romans on the smallest details of action as means of 
producing effect. Generally, their oratory was of a vehem.ent type. 
Gesture was freely used, and the voice raised to its fullest pitch. 
Trachalus had such a noisy organ that it drowned the pleaders in the 
other courts. Even after the decay of freedom th.-B fier}'- gestures 
that had been once its language were not discarded ; at the same 
time perfect modulation and symmetry were aimed at, so that even 
in the most empresse passages decorum was not violated. The 
systematized rhetorical training at present general in France, and 
practised by all who aspire to arouse the feeling of an assembly, is 
probably the nearest, though it may be but a faint, equivalent of the. 
vigorous action of the Roman courts. The twelfth book treats of the 
moral qualifications necessary for a great speaker. Quintilian insists 
strongly on these. The good orator must be a good man. The 
highest talents are nothing if distorted by evil thoughts. We 
thus see that he took a worthy view of his profession, and would 
never have degraded it to be the instrument of tyranny or a 
means of saturating the ears of the idle with seductive and com- 
plaisant theories of life, by which a spurious popularity is so 
cheaply obtained. He was a high-minded man " quantum Hcuit;" 
i.e., as far as a debased age allowed of high-minded ness. His 
domestic life was clouded by sorrow. His first wife died at 
the early age of nineteen, leaving him two sons, the younger of whom 
only lived to the age of seven, and the elder (for whose instruction 
he wrote the book, and whose precocious talent and goodness of 
disposition he recounts with pardonable pride) only survived his 
brother about four years. His death was an irremediable blow, 
which the orator bewails in the preface to his sixth book. The 
passage is instructive as revealing the taste of the day. The 
paternal regret clothes itself in such a profusion of antithesis, trope, 
and hyperbole, that, did we not know from other sources the excel- 
lence of his heai't, we might fancy he was exercising his talents in 
1 See Appendix. 



410 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

the sphere of professional advertisement. Before his endowment 
as professor, which appears to have brought him about <£800 a 
year, he had occasionally pleaded in the courts ; he appears to 
have Avritten declamations in various styles, but those now current 
unde.' his name are improperly ascribed to him. 

Among his pupils was the younger Pliny, who alludes to him 
with gratitude in one of his letters ;^ he was well thought of during 
his life, and is frequently mentioned by Statins, Martial, and 
Juvenal, both as the cleverest of rhetoricians, and the best and 
most trusted of teachers ;2 by Juvenal also as a bright instance 
of good fortune very rare among the brethren of the craft. ^ 

The style of Quintilian is modelled on that of Cicero, and is 
intended to be a return to the usages of the best period. He had 
a warm love for the writers of the republican age, above all for 
Cicero, whom he is never tired of praising ; and he preached a 
crusade against the tinsel ornaments of the new school whose 
viciousness, he thought, consisted chiefly in a corrupt following of 
Seneca. It was necessary, therefore, to impugn the authority of his 
brilliant compatriot, and this he appears to have done with such 
warmth as to give rise to the opinion that he had a personal grudge 
against him. Some critics have noticed that Quintilian, even when 
blaming, often falls into the pointed antithetical style of his time. 
This is true. But it was unavoidable ; for no man can detach himself 
from the mode of speaking common to those with whom he lives. 
It is sufficient if he be aware of its worse faults, point out their ten- 
dency, and strive to avoid them. This undoubtedly Quintilian did. 

Among prose writers of less note we may mention Licixius 
MuciANUs, Cluvius Eufus, who both wrote histories ; and Vip- 
STANUS Messala, an orator of the reactionary school, who, like 
Quintilian, sought to restore a purer taste, and devoted some of 
his time to historical essays on the events he had witnessed. M. 
Aper and Julius Secundus are important as being two of the 
speakers introduced into Tacitus's dialogue on oratory, the former 
taking the part of the modern style, the latter mediating between 
the two extreme views, but inclining towards the modern. All 
these belonged to the reigns of Vesjjasian and Titus, and Hved 
into the first years of Domitian. 

An important writer for students of ancient applied science is 
Sex. Julius Frontinus, whose career extends from about 40 a.d. 
to the end of the first century. He was praetor urbanus 70 a.d., 
and was emjDloyed in responsible military posts in Gaul and Britain, 

1 Pliii. vi. 32. ^ Juv. iv. 75. 

3 Juv. vii. 186. riiny gave Mm £400 towards his danglit-r's dowry, a 
proof that, though he might be well oif, he could not be considered rich. 



FEOxnxus. 41 1 

In tlie former country lie reduced the powerful tribe of the Lingones; 
in Britain, as successor to Petilius Cerealis, he distinguished him- 
self against the Silures, showing, says Tacitus, qualities as great as 
it was safe to show at that time. He was thrice consul, once under 
Domitian, again under Xerva (97 a.d.), and lastly under Trajan 
(100 A.D.), when he had for colleague the emperor himself. He 
died 103 a.d. or perhaps in the following year. Pliny the younger 
knew him well, and has several notices of him in his letters. 
Throughout his active life he was above all things a man of busi- 
ness : literature and science, though he was a proficient in both, 
were made strictly subservient to the ends of his profession. His 
character was cautious but independent, and he is the only con- 
temporary writer we possess who does not flatter Domitian. The 
•work on gromatics, which originally contained two books, has 
descended to us only in a few short excerpts, which treat de agro- 
rum qualitate, de controv%rdis, de limitihus, de controversiis 
aquarum. This was written early in the reign of Domitian. 
Another work of the same period was a theoretical treatise on 
tactics, alluded to in the more popular work which we possess, and 
quoted by Vegetius who followed him. In this he exam^ined Greek 
theories of warfare as well as Eoman, and apparently "v\ith discri- 
mination; for Aelian, in his account of the Greek strategical \AT:iters, 
assigns Frontinus a high j^lace. The comprehensive manual called 
Strategematon {sollertia ducum facta) is intended for general read- 
ing among those who are interested in military matters. The 
books are arranged according to their subjects, but in the distribu- 
tion of these there is no definite plan followed. Many interpola- 
tions have been inserted, especially in the fourth and last book 
which is a kind of appendix, adding general examples of strategic 
sayings and doings (strategcmatica) to the specifically-selected in- 
stances of the strategic art which are treated in the first three. 
Its introduction, as Teuff'el remarks, is written in a boastful style 
quite foreign to Frontinus, and the arrangement of anecdotes under 
various moral headings reminds us of a rhetorician like Valerius 
Maximus, rather than of a man of aff^airs. The entire fourth book 
appears to b(^. an accretion, perhaps as early as the fourth century. 
The last treatise by Frontinus which we possess is that De Aquls 
Urhis- Romae, or with a slightly different tible, De Aquaedudu, or 
De Gura Aquarum, published under Trajan soon after the death of 
Nerva. In an admirable preface he explains that his invariable 
custom when intrusted with any work was to make himself 
thoroughly acquainted with the subject in all its bearings before 
beginning to act ; he could thus work with greater promptitude 
and despatch, and besides gained a theoretical knowledge which 



412 HISTORY OF KOMAN LITERATURE. 

miglit have escaped Mm amid tlie multitude of practical details. 
Frontinus's account of the water-supply of Eome is complete and 
valuable : recent explorers have found it thoroughly trustworthy, 
and have heen aided by it in reconstructing the topography of tho 
ancient city.^ The architecture of Eome has been reproached with 
some justice for bestowing its finest achievements on buildings 
destined for amusement, or on mere private dwellings. But if 
from the amphitheatres, the villas, the baths, we turn to the roads, 
the sewers, and the aqueducts, we shall agree with Frontinus in 
deeply admiring so grand a combination of the artistic with the 
useful. A practical recognition of some of the great sanitary laws 
seem to have early prevailed at Eome, and might well excite our 
wonder, if such things had not been as a rule passed by in silence 
by historians. Eecent discoveries are tending to set the early 
civilisation of Eome on a far higher level than it has hitherto been 
able to claim. 

The style of Frontinus is not so devoid of ornament as might be 
expected f r m one so much occupied in business ; but the ornament 
it has is of the best kind. He shuns the conceits of the period, 
and goes back to the republican authors, of whom (and especially 
of Caesar's Commentaries) his language strongly reminds us. We 
observe that the very simplicity which Quintilian sought in vain 
from a lifelong rhetorical training is present unsought in Frontinus ; 
a clear proof that it is the occupation of life and the nature of the 
man, not the varnish of artistic culture, however elaborately laid 
on, that determines the main characteristics of the writer. 

ISTo other prose authors of any name have come down to us from 
this epoch. A vast number of persons are flatteringly saluted by 
Statins and jMartial as orators, historians, jurists, &c. ; but these 
venal poets had a stock of complimentary phrases always ready for 
any one powerful enough to command them. When we read there- 
fore that Tutilius, Eegulus, Flavins Ursus, Septimius Severus, were 
great writers, we must accept the statement only with considerable 
reductions. Yictorius Marcellus, the friend to whom Quintilian 
dedicates his treatise, was probably a person of some real eminence ; 
his juridical knowledge is celebrated by Statins. The Silvae of 
Statins and the letters of Pliny imply that there was a very active 
and generally diffused interest in science and letters ; but it is easy 
to be somebody where no one is great. Among grammarians Aemi- 
Lius AsPER deserves notice. ^ He seems to have beenliAdng while 

^ Mr Parker told the writer that it was impossible to overrate the ac- 
curacy of Frontinus, and his extraordinary clearness of description, wliich 
he had found an invaluable guide in many laborious and minute investiga- 
tions on the water supply of ancient Rome, 

■2 He is named by St Aug. De Util. Cred. 17. 



OTHER WPJTEES. 



413 



Suetonius composed his biography of grammarians, since lie is not 
included in it. He continued the studies of Cornutus and Probus 
of Berj'tus, and was best known for his Quaediones Virc/iUanae 
(of which several fragments still remain), and his commentaries on 
Terence and Sallust. Laegus Licinus, the author of Ciceromastix, 
may perhaps bo referred to this time. The reiterated commenda- 
tion of Cicero occurring in Quintilian may have roused the modern- 
ising party into active opposition, and draAvn out this brochure. 
History and philosophy both sunk to an extremely low ebb j no 
writers on these subjects worthy of mention are preserved. 



APPENDIX. 

Quintilian'' s Account of the Roman Authors. 



We subjoin a translation of Quin- 
tiliau's criticism of the chief Roman 
authors as very important for the 
student of Latin litemtnie, premising, 
however, tliat he judged them solely 
as regards their utility to one who is 
preparing to hccome an orator. The 
criticism, although thus special, has 
a permanent value, as embracing the 
best opinion of the time, temperately 
stated (Inst. Or. xi. 85-131):— " The 
same order will he observed in treat- 
ing the Iioman writers. As Homer 
among the Greeks, so Virgil among 
our own authors will best head the 
list ; he is beyond doubt the second 
ei)ic poet of either nation. I will use 
the words I heard Domitius Afer use 
when I was a boy. When I asked 
him who he considered came nearest 
to Homer, he replied, " Virgil is the 
second, but he is nearer the first than 
the third;" and in truth, while Ron)e 
cannot but yield to that celestial and 
deathless genius, yet we can observe 
more care and diligence in Virgil ; for 
this very reason, perhaps, that he was 
obliged to labour more. And so it is 
that we make up for the lack of occa- 
sional splendour by consistent and 
equable excellence. All the other 
epicists will follow at a respectful 
di.s lance. Maccr and Lucretius are 
indeed worth reading, but are of no 
value for the phraseology, which is 



the main body of eloquence. Each is 
good in his own subject ; but the for- 
mer is humble, the latter difficult. 
Va7'ro Atacinus, in those works which 
have gained him fame, appears as a 
translator by no means contemptible, 
but is not rich enough to add to the re- 
sources of eloquence. Ennius let ua 
reverence as we should groves of holy 
antiquity, whose grand and venerable 
trees have more sanctity than beauty. 
Others are nearer our own day, and 
more useful for the matter in hand. 
Ovid in his heroics is as usual wanton, 
and too fond of his own talent, but in 
parts he deserves praise. Cornelius 
Scverus, though a better versifier than 
poet, would still claim the second 
place, if only he had written all his 
Sicilian War as well as the first book. 
But his early death did not allow hi^s 
genius to be matured. His boyish 
works show a great and admirable 
talent, and a desire for the best style 
rare at that time of life. AVe have 
lately lost much in Valerias Flaccus. 
The inspiration of Saleius Bassus was 
vigorous and poetical, but old age 
never succeeded in ripening it. Ila- 
birius and Pcclo are worth reading, if 
you have time. Lucan is ardent, 
earnest, and full of admirably ex- 
pressed sentiments, and, to give my 
real opinion, should be classed witk 
orators rather than poets. We Lave 



414 



HISTOEY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 



named these because Germanicus Au- 
gustus (Dotnitian) has been diverted 
from, his favourite pursuit by the care 
of the world, and the gods thought 
it too little for him to be the first of 
poets. Yet what can be more sublime, 
learned, matchless in every way, than 
the poems in which, giving up em- 
pire, he spent the privacy of his youth? 
Who could sing of wars so well as 
he who has so successfully waged 
them? To whom would the goddesses 
who watch over studies listen so pro- 
pitiously ? To whom would Minerva,* 
the patroness of his house, more 
willingly reveal the mysteries of her 
art ? Future ages will recount these 
things at greater length. For now 
this glory is obscured by the splen- 
dour of his other virtues. We, how- 
ever, who worship at the shrine of 
letters will crave your indulgence, 
Caesar, for not passing the subject by 
in silence, and will at least bear wit- 
ness, as Virgil says, 

'That ivy wreathes the laurels of your 
crown.' 

" In elegy, too, we challenge the 
Greeks. The tersest and most elegant 
author of it is in my opinion Tihullics. 
Others prefer Proper this. Ovid is more 
luxuriant, Gallics harsher, than either. 
Satire is all our own. In this Lucilius 
lirst gained great renown, and even 
now has many admirers so wedded to 
him, as to prefer him not only to all 
other satirists but to all other poets. 
I disagree with them as much as I dis- 
agree with Horace, who thinks Lucilius 
flows in a muddy stream, and that 
there is much that one would wish to 
remove. For there is wonderful 
learning in him, freedom of speech 
with the bitterness that comes there- 
from, and an inexhaustible wit. 
Horace is far terser and purer, and 
without a rival in his sketches of 
character. Pcrsius has earned much 
true glory by his single book. There 
are men now living who are renowned, 
and others who will be so hereafter. 
That earlier sort of satire not written 
exclusively in verse was founded by 
Terentius Farro, the most learned of 



th(» Eomans. He composed a vast 
number of extremely erudite treatises, 
being well versed in the Latin tongue 
as well as in every kind of antiquarian 
knowledge ; he will, however, con- 
tribute much more to science than 
to oratory. 

' ' The iambus is not much in vogue 
among the Romans as a separate form 
of poetry ; it is more often inter- 
spersed with other rhythms. Its 
bitterness is found in Catullus, JBiba- 
culus, and Horace, tliough in the last 
the epode breaks its monotony. 

** Of lyricists Horace is, I may say, 
the only one worth reading ; for he 
sometimes rises, and he is always full 
of sweetness and grace, and most 
happily daring in figures and expres- 
sions. If any one else be added, it 
must be Caewius Bassus, whom we 
have lately seen, but there are living 
lyricists far greater than he. 

** Of the ancient tragedians Accius 
and Pacuvius are the most renowned 
for the gravity of their sentiments, 
the weight of their words, and the 
dignity of their characters. But 
brilliancy of touch and the last polish 
in completing their work seems to 
have been Avanting, not so much to 
themselves as to their times. Accius 
is held to be the more powerful writer; 
Pacuvius (by those who wish to be 
thought learned) the moi'c learned. 
Next comes the Thycstes of Varmis, 
which may be compared with any of 
the Greek plays. The Medea of Ovid 
shows what that poet might have 
achieved if he had but controlled in- 
stead of indulging his inspiration. Of 
those of my own day Pomponius Se- 
cundus is by far the greatest. The 
old critics, indeed, thought him want- 
ing in tragic foi'ce, but they confessed 
his learning and brilliancy. 

" In comedy we halt most lament- 
ably. It IS true that Varro declares 
(after Aelius Stilo) that the muses, had 
they been willing to talk Latin, would 
have used the language of Plautus. 
It is true also that the ancients had a 
high respect for Caecilius, and that 
they attributed the plays of Terence 



I 



APPENDIX. 



415 



to Scipio — pla3'3 that are of their 
kind most elegant, and would be even 
more pleasing if they had kept within 
the iambic metre. We can scarcely 
reproduce in comedy a faint shadow 
of our originals, so that I am com- 
pelled to believe the language incap- 
able of that grace, which even in 
Greek is peculiar to the Attic, or at 
any rate has never been attained in 
any other dialect. Afraniits excels in 
the national comedy, but I wish he 
had not defiled his plots by licentious 
allusions. 

"In history at all events, I would 
not yield the palm to Greece. I 
should have no fear in matching 
Sallust against Thucydides, nor 
would Herodotus disdain to be com- 
pared with Livy — Livy, the most de- 
lightful in narration, the most candid 
in judgment, the most eloquent in 
his speeches that can be conceived. 
Everything is perfectly adapted both 
to the circumstances and personages 
introduced. The affections, and, above 
all, the softer ones, have never (to say 
the least), been more persuasively in- 
troduced by any writer. Thus by a 
different kind of excellence he has 
equalled the immortal rapidity of 
Sailust. Servilius Nonianus well 
said to me: 'They are not like, but 
they are equal.' I used often to 
listen to his recitations ; a man of 
lofty spirit and full of brilliant senti- 
ments, but less condensed than the 
majesty of history demands. This 
condition was better fulfilled by 
Aufidius Bassus, who was a little his 
senioi-, at any rate in his books on 
the German War, in which the author 
was admirable in his general treat- 
ment, but now and then fell below 
himself. There still survives and 
adorns the literary glory of our age 
a man worthy of an immortal record, 
who will be named some day, but 
now is only alluded to. He has many 
to admire, none to imitate him, as if 
freedom, though he clips her wings, 
had injured him. But even in what 
he has allowed to remain you can 
detect a spirit full lofty, and opinions 



courageously stated. There are other 
good writers ; but at present we are 
tasting, as it were, the samples, not 
ransacking the libraries. 

"It is the orators who more than 
any have made Latin eloquence a 
match for that of Greece. For I 
could boldly pitch Cicero again.st any 
of their champions. Nor am I ignor- 
ant how great a strife I should be 
stirring up (especially as it is no part 
of my plan), were I to compare him 
with Demosthenes. This is the less 
necessary, since I think Demosthenes 
should be read (or rather learnt by 
heart) above every one else. Their 
excellences seem to me to be very 
similar ; there is the same plan, 
order of division, method of prepara- 
tion, proof, and all that belongs to 
invention. In the oratorical style 
there is some difference. The one is 
closer, the other move fluent ; the 
one draws his conclusion with more 
incisiveness, the other with greater 
breadth ; the one always wields a wea- 
pon with a sharp edge, the other fre- 
quently a heavy one as well ; from the 
one nothing can be taken, to the 
other nothing can be added ; the one 
shows more care, the other more 
natural gift. In wit and pathos, both 
important points, Cicero is clearly 
first. Perhaps the custom of his state 
did not allow Demosthenes to use the 
epilogue, but then neither does the 
genius of Latin oratory allow us to 
employ ornaments which the Athe- 
nians admire. In their letters, of 
which both have left several, there 
can be no comparison ; nor in their 
dialogues, of which Demosthenes has 
not left any. In one point we must 
yield : Demosthenes came first, and 
of course had a great share in making 
Cicero what he was. For to me 
Cicero seems in his intense zeal for 
imitating the Greeks to have united 
the force of Demosthenes, the copi- 
ousness of Plato, and the sweetness 
of Isocrates. Nor has he only ac- 
quired by study all that was best in 
each, but has even exalted the ma- 
jority if not the vhole of their excel* 



416 



HISTOEY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 



lences by the inexpressible fertility 
of his glorious talent. For, as Pin- 
dar says, he does not collect rain- 
water, but bursts forth in a living 
stream ; born by the gift of providence 
that eloquence miglit put forth and 
test all her powers. Eor who can teach 
more earnestly or move njore vehe- 
mently ? to whom was such sweetness 
ever given? The very concessions 
he extorts you think he begs, and 
while by his swing he carries the 
judge right across the course, the 
man seems all the while to be follow- 
ing of his own accord. Then in 
everything he advances there is such 
strength of assertion that one is 
ashamed to disagree ; nor does he 
bring to bear the eagerness of an 
advocate, but the moral confidence 
of a juryman or a witness ; and mean- 
while all those graces, which separate 
individuals with the most constant 
care can hardly obtain, flow from 
him without any premeditation ; and 
that eloquence which is so delicious 
to listen to seems to carry on its 
surface the most perfect freedom 
irom labour. Wherefore his con- 
temporaries did right to call him 
" king of the courts ; " and posterity 
to give him such renown that Cicero 
stands for the name not of a man but 
of eloquence itself. Let us then fix 
our eyes on him ; let his be the ex- 
ample we set before us ; let him who 
loves Cicero well know that his own 
progress has been great. In Asinius 
Pollio there is inucLinvention, much, 
according to some, excessive, dili- 
gence ; but he is so far from the 
brilhancy and sweetness of Cicero 
that he might be a generation earlier. 
But Messala is polished and open, 
and in a way carries his noble birth 
into his style of eloquence, but he 
lacks vigour. If Julms Caesar had 
only had leisure for the forum, h,e 
Avould be the one we should select as 
the rival of Cicero. He has such 
force,_ point, and vehemence of style, 
that it is clear he spoke with the 
same mind that he warred. Yet all 



is covered with a wondrous elegance 



of expression, of which he was |)ecuH- 
arly studious. There was much 
talent in Caclius, and in accusations 
chiefly he showed a great urbanity; 
he was a man worthy of a better 
mind and a longer iUa. I Imve 
found those who prefer Calvus to 
any orator ; I have found others who 
thought with Cicero that by too 
strict criticism of himself he lo.st real 
power ; but his style is weighty and 
noble, guarded, and often vehement. 
He was an enthusiastic atticist, and 
his early death may be considered a 
misfortune, if we can believe that a 
longer life wouldhaveaddedsomething 
to his over concise manner. Servhcs 
Sulpidus has earned considerable 
fame by his three speeches. Cassiiis 
'<cverus will give many points for 
-ajitation if he be read judiciously ; if 
he had added colour and weight to 
his other good qualities of style, he 
would be placed extremely high. 
For he has great talent and wonder- 
ful power of satire. His urbanitv, 
too, is great, but he gave himself up 
to passion rather than reason. And 
as his wit is always bitter, so the 
very bitterness of it sometimes makes 
it ludicrous. I need not enumerate 
the rest of this long list. Of my 
own contemporaries Domitius Afer 
and Julius Jfricanus are far the 
greatest; the former in art and 
general style, the latter in earnest- 
ness, and the sorting of words, which 
sorting, however, is perhaps exces- 
sive, as his arrangements are lengthy 
and his metaphors immoderate. 
There have been lately some great 
masters inthis line. Trachalus was 
often sublime, and very open in his 
manner, a man to whom you gave 
credit for good motives ; but he was 
much greater heard than read. For 
he had a beauty of voice such as 1 
have never known in any other, an 
articulation good enough for the 
stage, and grace of perso"n and every 
other external advantage were at 
their height in him. Vibius Crisims 
was neat, elegant, and pleasing, 
better for private than public causes. 



APPEXDIX. 



417 



Had Julius Sccundus lived longer, 
his renown as an orator wonl-i be 
first-rate. For he, would have added, 
as indeed he had already began to 
add, all the desiderata for the highest 
ideal. He would have been more 
combative, and more attentive to the 
subject, even to an occasional neglect 
of the manner. Cut off as he was, he 
nevertheless merits a high place ; 
such is his facility of s])eech, his 
charm in explaining what he has to 
say ; his open, gentle, and specious 
style, his perfect selection ®f words, 
even those which are adopted on the 
spur of the moment ; his vigorous 
application of analogies extemporane- 
ously suggested. My successors in 
rhetorical criticism will have a rich 
field for praising those who are now liv- 
ing. For there are now great talents 
at work who do credit to the bar, 
both finished patrons, worthy rivals 
of the ancients, and industrious 
youths, following them in the path 
of excellence. 

" There remain the philosophers,few 
of whom have attained to eloquence. 
Cicero, here as evei', is the rival of 
Plato. Bridus stands in this depart- 
ment much higlipr than as an orator; 
he suffices for the wt^ight of his mat- 
ter ; you can see he feels what he 
says. Cornelius Celsus, following the 
Scxtii, lias written a good deal with 
point and elegance. Plancus among 
the Stoics is useful for his knowledge. 
Among EpicureaTis, Catius though a 
liglit is a pleasant writer. I have 
purposely deferred Seneca until the 
end, because of the false report cur- 
rent that I condemn him, and even 
personally dislike him. This results 
from my endeavour to recal to a 
severer standard a corrupt and effcni- 
nnte taste. When I bega) my '^ru- 
sade, Seneca was almost he only 
writer in the hands of the young. 
Nor did I try to "disestablish" him 
altogether, but only to prevent his 
being placed above better men, whom 
he continually attar.'ked, from a con- 
Bciousnesa that his special talents 



would never allow him to please 
in the way tliey pleased. And then 
his pm)ils loved him better than they 
imitated him, and in their imitations 
fell as much below him as he had 
fallen below the ancients. I only 
wish they could have been equals or 
seconds to such a man. But lie 
pleased them solely through his faults; 
and it was to reproduce these that 
they all strove with their utmost 
efforts, and then, boasting that they 
spoke in his style, they greatly in- 
jured his fame. He, indeed, had 
many and great excellences ; an easy 
and fertile talent, much study, much 
knowledge, though in this he was 
often led astray by those he employed 
to "research" for him. He treated 
nearly the whole cycle of knowledge. 
For he has left speeches, poems, let- 
ters, and dialogues. In philosophy 
he was not very accurate, but he was 
a notable rebuker of vice. Many 
brilliant apophthegms are scattered 
through his works ; much, too, may 
be read with a moral purpose. But 
from the point of view of eloquence 
his style is corrupt, and the more 
pernicious because he abounds in 
])lcasant faults. One could wish he 
had used his own talent and another 
person's judgment. For had he de- 
spised son>e modes of effect, had he 
not striven after others {partem), if 
he had not loved all that was his own, 
if he had not broken the weight of 
his subjects by his short cut-up sen- 
tences, he would be approved by the 
consent of the learned rather than by 
the enthusiasm of boys. For all this, 
he should be read, but only by those 
who are robust and well prepared by 
a course of stricter models ; and for 
this object, to exercise their judgment 
on both sides. For there is much 
that is good in him, much to admire; 
only it requires picking out, a thing 
he himself ought to have done. A 
nature which could always achieve its 
object was vvorthy of having striven 
after a bettor object than- it did." 



2 D 



CHAPTEE YL 

The Eeigns of Yespasian, Titus, and Domitian (a.d. 69-96). 

2. Poets. 

The poet is usually credited with a genius more independent of 
external circumstances than any other of nature's favourites. His 
inspiration is more creative, more unearthly, more constraining, 
more unattainable by mere effort. He seems to forget the world 
in his own inner sources of thought and feeling. As circum- 
tances cannot produce him, so they do not greatly affect his genius. 
He is the product of causes as yet unknown to the student of 
human progress ; he is a boon for which the age that has him 
should be grateful, a sort of aerii mellis caelestia dona. Modern 
hterature is full of this conception. The poet " does but speak 
because he must ; he sings but as the limiets sing." Never has 
the sentiment been expressed with deeper pathos than by Shelley's 
well-known lines : 

** Like a poet hidden 

In the light of thoT!io;ht, 
Singing hymns unbidden, . 
Till the world is wroitght 
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not." 

The idea that the poet can neither be made on the one hand, nor 
repressed if he is there, on the other, has become deeply rooted in 
modern literary thought. And yet if we look through the epochs 
that have been most fertile of great poets, the instances of such 
self-sufficing hardiness are rare. In Greek poetry we question 
whether there is one to be found. In Latin poetry there is only 
Lucretius. In modern times, it is true, they are more numerous, 
owing to the greater complexity of our social conditions, and the 
greater difficulty for a strongly sensuous or deeply spiritual poetic 
nature to be in harmony with them all. Putting aside these 
solitary voices we should say on the whole that poetry, at least in 
ancient times, was the tenderest and least hardy of all garden 
flowers. It needed, so to say, a special soil, constant care, and 



I 



REDUCED SCOPE OF POETKY. 419 



shelter from tlie rude blast. It could blossom ovlj in the summer 
of patronage, popular or imperial ; the storms of war and revolu- 
tion, and the chill frost of despotism, were equally fatal to its 
tender life. Where its supports were strong its own strength 
came out, and that with such luxuriance as to hide the props 
which lay beneath; but when once the inspiring consciousness 
of sympathy and aid was lost, its fair head drooped, its fragrance 
was forgotten, and its seeds were scattered to the waste of air. 

If Lucan's claim to the name of poet be dT^puted, what shall we 
say to the so-called poets of the Flavian age 1 to Valerius Flaccus, 
Silius, Statins, and Martial 1 In one sense they are poets certainly ; 
they have a thorough mastery over the form of their art, overr4h.e 
hackneyed themes of verse. Eut in the inspiration that makes 
the bard, in the grace that should adorn his mind, in the famili- 
arity with noble thoughts which lends to the Pharsalia an undis- 
puted greatness, they are one and all absolutely wanting. ISTone 
of them raise in the reader one thrill of pleasure, none of them 
add one single idea to em^ich the inheritance of mankind. The 
works of Pliny and Quintilian cannot indeed be ranked among 
the masterpieces of literature. But in elegant greatness they are 
immeasurably superior to the works of their brethren of the l}Te. 
Science can seek a refuge in the contemplation of the material 
universe ; if it can find no law there, no justice, no wisdom, no 
comfort, it at least bows before unchallenged greatness. Ehetoric 
can solace its aspu-ations in a noble though hopeless effort to 
rekindle an extinct past. Poetry, that should point the way to 
the ideal, that should bear witness if not to goodness at least to 
beauty and to glory, grovels in a base contentment with all 
that is meanest and shallowest in the present, and owns no 
source of inspiration but the bidding of superior force, or the 
insulting bribe of a despot's minion which derides in secret the 
very flattery it buys. 

These poets need not detain us long. There is little to interest 
us in them, and they are of httle importance in the history of 
literature. The first of them is C. Valerius Placcus Setinus 
Balbus.i He was born not, as his name would indicate, at Setia, 
but at Patavium.2 We gather from a passage in his poem^ that 
he filled the office of Qaindecimvir sacris faciundis, and from 

^ In the single ancient codex of the Vatican, at the end of the second book 
we read C. Val. Fl. Balbi explicit,, Lib. II.; at the end of the fourth book, 
C. Val. FL Setini, Lib. IV. explicit ; at the end of the seventh, C. Val. Fl. 
Setini, Argnnautlcon, Lib, VII. e:cr)licit. The obscurity of these names haa 
caused some critics to doubt whether they really belonged to the poet. 

2 Mart L 61 -i 3 i^ 5^ 



420 HISTOKY OF KOMAN LITEEATURE. 

Quintilian^ that lie was cut off by an early death. The date of 
this event may be fixed with probability to the year 88 a,d.2 
Bureau de la Malle has disputed this, and thinks it probable that 
he lived until the reign of Trajan ; but this is in itself unhkely, 
and inconsistent with the obviously unfinished state of the poeni. 
The legend of the Argonauts which forms its subject was one that 
had already been treated by Yarro Atacinus apparently in the 
form of an imitation or translation from the same writer, Adpol- 
lonius Ehodius, whom Valerius also chose as his model. But 
whereas Varro's poem was little more than a free translation, that 
of Valerius is an amplification and study from the original of a 
more ambitious character. It consists of eight books, of Avhich 
the last is incomplete, and in estimating its merits or demerits we 
must not forget the immaturity of its author's talent. 

The opening dedication to Vespasian fixes its composition 
under his reign. Its profane flattery is in the usual style of the 
period, but lacks the brilliancy, the audacity, and the satire of 
that of Lucan. From certain allusions it is probable that the 
poem was written soon after the conquest of Jerusalem by Titus^ 
(a.d. 70). There is considerable learning shown, but a desire to 
compress allusions into a small space and to suggest trains of 
mythological recollection by passing hints, interfere with the 
lucidity of the style. In other respects the diction is classical 
and elegant, and both rhythm and language are closely modelled 
on those of Virgil. Licences of versification are rare. The spon- 
daic line, rarely used by Ovid, almost discarded by Lucan, but which 
reappears in Statins, is sparingly employed by Valerius. Hiatus 
is still rarer, but the shortening of final o occurs in verbs and 
nominatives, such as Juno, Virgo, whenever it suits the metre. 
His speeches are rhetorical but not extravagant, some, e.g., that of 
Helle to Jason, are very pretty. In descriptive power he rises to 
his highest level ; some of his subjects are extremely vivid and 
might form subjects for a painting.* Duriug the time that he 
was writing the eruption of Vesuvius occurred, and he has 
described it with the zeal of a witness.^ 

*' Sic ubi prorupti tonuit cum forte Vesevi 
Hesperiae letalis apex; vixdum ignea montem 
Torsit hiems, iamque Eoas ciuis induit urbes." 

But in this, as in all the descriptive pieces, however striking and 

^ X. i. 90. 2 So Dodwell, Annal. Quintil. ^ 1. ''i,sqq. 

^ E.g.,oi Titus storming Jerusalem (i. 13), 

" Solj'mo nifrvantem pnlvere fratem 
Spargentemque faces, et in omiii tune furentem." 

5 iv. 508 : cf. iv. 210. 



SILIUS ITALICUS. 421 

elaborate, of the period of tlie decline, are prominently \dsil)le tlie 
strained endeavour to be emphatic, and the continual dependence 
upon book reminiscence instead of first-hand observation. Valerius 
is no exception to the rule. JSTor is the next author who presents 
himself any better in this respect, the voluptuary and poetaster 
C. SiLius Italicus. 

This laborious compiler and tasteless versifier was born 25 a.d., 
or according to some 24 a.d., and died by his own act seventy-six 
years later. He is known to us as a copyist of Virgil ; to his con- 
temporaries he was at least as well known as a clever orator and 
luxurious virtuoso. His early fondness for Virgil's poetry may 
be presumed from the dedication of Cornutus's treatise on that 
subject to him, but he soon deserted literature for public life, in 
which (68 A.D.) he attained the highest success by being nomi- 
nated consul. He had been a personal friend of Vitellius and of 
Nero ; but now, satisfied with his achievements, he settled down 
on his estate;;', and composed his poem on the Punic Wars in 
sixteen books. Most of the information we possess about him is 
gathered from the letter^ in Avhich Pliny narrates his death. We 
translate the most striking passages for the reader's benefit. 

" I have just heard that SiHus has closed his life in his Neapolitan villa by 
voluntary abstinence. Tlie cause of his preferring to die was ill-health. He 
suffered from an incurable tumour, the trouble arising from which deter- 
mined him with singular resolution to seek death as a relief. His whole life 
had been unvaryingly fortunate, except that he had lost the younger of his two 
sons. On the other hand, he had lived to see his elder and more promising 
son succt-ed in life and obtain the consulship. He had injured his re])utation 
under Nero. It was believed he had acted as an informer. But after- 
wards, while enjoying Vitellius's friendship, he had conducted himself with 
courtesy and prudence. He had gained much credit by his proconsulship 
in Asia, and had since by an honourable leisure wiped out the blot which 
stained the activity of his former years. He ranked among the first men iti 
the state, but he neither retained power nor excited envy. He was saluted, 
courted ; he received levees often in his bed, always in his chamber, which 
was crowded with visitors, who came attracted by no considerations of liis 
fortune. When not occupied with writing, he passed his days in learned 
discourse. His poems evince more diligence than talent: he now and then 
by reciting challenged men's opinions upon them. Latterly, owing to ad- 
vancing years, he retired from Eonie and remained in Campania, nor did 
even the accession of a new emperor draw him forth. To allow this in- 
activity was most liberal on the em})eror's part, to have the coura"-e to 
accept it was equally honourable to Silius. He was a virtuoso, and was°even 
blamed for his propensities for collecting. He owned several country-houses 
in the same district, and was always so taken with each new house he pur- 
chased as to neglect the old for it. All of them were well stocked with 
books, statues, and busts of great men. These last he not only treasured but 
revered, above all, that of Virgil, whose birthday he kept more religiously 



Ep. HI. 7 



4:22 HISTORY 01' KOMAN LITERATUEE. 

than his own. He preferred celebrating it at Naples, where he visited the 
poet's tomb as if it had been a temple. Amid such complete tranquillity he 
passed his seventy-fifth year, not exactly weak in body, but delicate." 

To this notice of Pliny's we might add several by Martial; 
but as these refer to the same facts, adding beside only fulsome 
praises of the wealthy and dignified litterateur, they need not be 
quoted here. Quintilian does not mention him. But his silence 
is no token of disrespect ; it is merely an indication that Silius 
was still alive when the great critic wrote. 

There is little that calls for remark in his long and tedious 
work. He is a poet only by memory. Timid and nerveless, he 
lacks alike the vigorous beauties of the earlier school, and the 
vigorous faults of the later. He pieces together in the straggling 
mosaic of his poem hemistichs from his contemporaries, fragments 
from Livy, words, thoughts, epithets, and rhythms from Virgil ; 
and he elaborates the whole with a pre-Eaphaelite fidelity to 
details which completely destroys whatever unity the sulDJect 
suggested. 

This subject is not in itself a bad one, but the treatment he 
applies to it is unreal and insipid in the highest degree. He 
cannot perceive, for instance, that the divine interventions which 
are admissible in the quarrel of Aeneas and Turnus are ludicrous 
when imported into the struggle between Scipio and HannibaL 
And this inconsistency is the more glaring, since his extreme 
historical accuracy (an accuracy so strict as to make Niebuhr 
declare a knowledge of him indispensable to the student of the 
Punic Wars) gives to his chronicle a prosaic literalness from which 
nothing is more alien than the caprices of an imaginary pantheon. 
Who can help resenting the unreality, when at Saguntum Jupiter 
guides an arrow into Hannibal's body, which Juno immediately 
withdraws ? ^ or when, at Cannae, Aeolus yields to the prayer of 
Juno and blinds the Eomans by a whirlwind of dust 1 ^ These 
are two out of innumerable similar instances. Amid such in- 
congruities it is no wonder if the heroes themselves lose all body 
and consistency, so that Scipio turns into a kind of Paladin, and 
Hannibal into a monster of cruelty, whom we should not be sur- 
prised to see devouring children. Silius in poetry represents, on 
a reduced scale, the same reactionary sentiments that in prose 
animated Quintilian. So far he is to be commended. But if we 
must choose a companion among the Flavian poets, let it bo 
Statins wath all his faults, rather than this correct, only because 
completely talentless, compiler. 

1 Een. i. 535. ^ i^. 491. 



I 



siATius. 423 



To him let us now turn. "Witli filial pride lie attributes Lis 
eminence to tlie example and instruction of his father, P. Papinius 
Statius, who was, if we may believe his son, a distinguished and 
extremely successful poet.^ He was born either at Naples or at 
Selle; and the doubt hanging over this point neither the father nor 
the son had any desire to clear up ; for did not the same ambiguity 
attach to the birthplace of Homer 1 At any rate he established 
himself at IS'aples as a young man, and opened a school for 
rhetoric and poetry, engaging in the quinquennial contests him- 
self, and training his pupils to do the same. It is not certain 
that he ever settled at Eome ; his modest ambition seems to have 
been content mth provincial celebrity. What the subjects of his 
prize poetry were we have no means of ascertaining, but we know 
that he WTote a short epic on the wars between Yespasian and 
Titellius and contemplated writing another on the eruption of 
Vesuvius. His more celebrated son, P. Papixius Statius the 
younger, was born at Naples 61 a,d., and before his father's death 
had carried off the victory in the Neapolitan poetical games by a 
poem in honour of Ceres. ^ Shortly after this he returned to 
Eom^, where it is probable he had been educated as a boy, and 
in his twenty-first year married a young widow named Claudia 
(whose former husband seems to have been a singer or harpist),^ 
and their mutual attachment is a pleasing testimony to the poet's 
goodness of heart, a quality which the habitual exaggeration of 
his manner ineffectually tries to conceal. 

Domitian had instituted a yearly poetical contest at the Quin- 
quatria, in honour of Minerva, held on the Alban Mount. Statius 
was fortunate enough on three separate occasions to win the prize, 
his subject being in each case the praises of Domitian himself.* 
But at the great quinquennial Capitoline contest, in which ap- 
parently the subject was the praises of Jupiter,^ Statius was not 
equally successful.^ This defeat, which he bewails in more than 
one passage, was a disappointment he never quite overcame, 
though some critics have inferred from another passage ''' that on 
a subsequent occasion he came off victor; but this cannot be 
proved.^ 

Statius had something of the true poet in him. He had the 
love of nature and of those " cheap pleasures " of which Hume 

^ See Silv. V. iii. passim. This poem is a good instance of an epicecUon. 
Mb. 11. ii. 6. Mb. III. V. 52. 

* lb. HI. V. 28 ; cf. lY. ii 65. '^ Quint. III. vii. 4. 

« lb. III. \. 31. 7 Silv. IV. ii. 65. 

^ For a brilliant and interesting essay on the two Statii, the reader is re- 
ferred to Nisard, PoUes de la Demdencej vol. I. p. 303. 



424 HISTOEY 01' KOMAN LITERxVTUKE. 

writes, tlie pleasures of flowers, "birds, trees, fresTi air, a country 
landscape, a blue sky. These could not be had at Eome for all 
tbe favours of the emperor. Statins pined for a simpler life. 
He Avisbed also to provide for his step-daughter, whom be dearly 
loved, and wbose engaging beauty while occupied in reciting ber 
father's poems, or singing tbem to tbe music of tbe barp, be 
finely describes. Perhaps at N^aples a husband could be found 
for her? So to ITaples be went, and there in quiet retirement 
passed the short remainder of bis days, finishing his opus magnum 
the Tliehaid^ and writing the fragment that remains of his still 
more ambitious Acliilleicl. Tbe year of bis death is not certain, 
but it may be placed with some probability in 98 a.d. 

Statins was not merely a brilliant poet. He was a still more 
brilliant improvisator. Often be would pour forth to enthu- 
siastic listeners, as Ovid bad done before him, 

** His profuse strains of unpremeditated art." 

Improvisation bad long been cultivated among tbe Greeks. "We 
know from Cicero's oration on behalf of Arcbias that it was no 
rare accomplishment among tbe wits of. that nation. And it was 
not unknown among tbe Eomans, though with tbem also it was 
more commonly exercised in Greek than in Latin. The techni- 
calities of versification bad, since Ovid, ceased to involve any 
labour. ]^ot an aspirant of any ambition but was familiar with 
every page of the Gradus ad Parnassum, and could lay it under 
contribution at a moment's notice. Hence to write fluent verses 
was no merit at all; to Avrite epigrammatic verses was worth 
doing; but to extemporize a poem of from one to two hundred lines, 
of which every line should display a neat turn or a hon 7not, this 
was the most deeply coveted gift of all ; and it was the possession 
of this gift in its most seductive form that gave Statins unques- 
tioned, though not unenvied, pre-eminence among the beaux esprits 
of his day. His Silvae, which are trifles, but very charming ones, 
were most of them written within twenty-four hours after tbeii 
subjects had been suggested to him. Their elegant polish is 
nndeniable ; the worst feature about tbem is the base complais- 
ance with which this versatile flatterer wrote to order, without 
asking • any questions, Avhatever the eunuchs, pleasure-purveyors, 
or freedmen of the emperor desired. They are full of interest also 
as tbroAving light on the manners and fashions of the time and 
disclosing the frivolities which in tbe minds of all the members of 
the coiirt bad quite put out of sight tbe serious objects of life. 
They contain many notices of the poet and bis friends, and we 
learn that when they were composed he was at work on tbe 






THE RECITATIONS. 425 



Thebnid. He excuses these short jeux d'esprit by alleging the 
examiDle of Homer's Battle of the Frogs and Mice and Virgil's 
Culex. " I hardly know," he says, " of one illustrious poet who 
has not prefaced his nobler triumphs of song by some prelude in a 
lighter strain."^ The short prose introductions in which he de- 
scribes the poems that compose each book are well worth reading. 
The first book is addressed to his friend Arruntius Stella, who 
was, if we may believe Statins and Martial, himself no mean 
poet, and in his little Columba, an ode addressed to his mistress's 
dove, rivalled, if he did not surpass, the famous " sparrow-poem " 
of Catullus. He wrote also several other love poems, and per- 
haps essayed a heroic flight in celebrating the Sarmatian victories 
of Domitian.2 

The tSilvae were for the most part read or recited in public. 
We saw in a former chapter ^ that Asinius Pollio first introduced 
these readings. His object in doing so is uncertain. It may 
have been to solace himself for the loss of a political career, or it 
may have been a device for ascertaining the value of new works 
before granting them a place in his public library. The recita- 
tions thus served the purpose of the modern reviews. They 
affixed to each new work the critic's verdict, and assigned to it 
its place among the list of candidates for fame. Ko sooner was 
the practice introduced than it became popular. Horace akeady 
complains of it, and declares that he will not indulge it : * 

** Non recito cuiqnain nisi amicis, idc[ue coactus, 
Non ubivis corumve quibuslibet." 

He with greater wisdom read his poems to some single friend whose 
judgment and candour he could trust — some Quinctilius Varus, 
or Maecius Tarpa — and he advised his friends the Pisos to do the 
same ; but his advice was little heeded. Even during his lifetime 
the vain thirst for applause tempted many an author to submit 
his compositions to the hasty judgment of a fashionable assembly, 
and (fond hope !) to promise himself an immortality proportioned 
to their compliments. Ovid's muse drew her fullest inspiration 
from the excitements of the hall, and the poet bitterly complains 
in exile that now this stimulus to effort is withdrawn he has lost 
the power and even the desire to write.^ Nor was it only poetry 
that was thus criticised; grave historians read their works before 
publishing them, and it is related of Claudius that on hearing the 
thunders of applause which were bestowed on the recitations of 

^ The fifth book is unfinished. Probably lie did not care to recur to it 
after leaving Rome. 

2 Silv. I. ii. 95. 3 p^ook IT. part IT. ch. i. 

* Sat. I. iv. 73. « Pout. IV. ii. 34; Trist. III. xiv. 39. 



426 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

Servilins ISTonianiis, lie entered tlie building and seated himself 
uninvited amonjv the enthusiastic listeners. Under I^ero, the 
readings, which had hitherto been a custom, became a law, that is, 
were upheld by legal no less than social obligations. The same is 
true of Domitian's reign. This ill-educated prince wished to feign 
an interest in literature, the more so, since l^evo, whom he imitated, 
had really been its eager votary. Accordingly, he patronised the ■ 
readings of the principal poets, and above all, of Statins. This was' 
the golden time of recitations, or ostenfationes, as they now with 
sarcastic justice began to be called, and Statins was their chief 
hero. As Juvenal tells us, he made the whole city glad when he 
promised a day.^ His recitations were often held at the houses of 
his great friends, men like Abascantius or Glabrio, adventurers of ,^ 
yesterday, who had come to Rome with " chalked feet," and now 
had been raised by Caesar to a height whence they looked with 
scorn upon the scattered relics of nobihty. It is these men that 
Statins so adroitly flatters ; it is to them that he looks for counte- 
nance, for patronage, for more substantial rewards; and yet so 
wretched is the recompense even of the highest popularity, that 
Statins would have to beg his bread if he did not find a better 
employer in the actor and manager, Paris, who pays him hand- 
somely for the tragedies that at each successive exhaustion of his 
exchequer he is fain to write for the taste of a corrupt mob.^ But \ 
at last Statins began to see the folly of all this. He grew tired of 
hiring himself out to amuse, of practising the affectation of a 
modesty, an inspiration, an emotion he did not feel, of hearing tlie 
false plaudits of rivals who he knew carped at his verses in his 
absence and libelled his character, of running hither and thither 
over Parnassus dragging his poor muse at the heels of some selfish 
freedman ; he was man enough and poet enough to wish to write 
something that would live, and so he left Pome to con over his 
mythological erudition amid a less exciting environment, and woo 
the genius of poesy where its last great master had been laid to 
rest. 

After Statius had left Pome, the popularity of the recitations 
gradually decreased. No poet of equal attractiveness was left to 
hold them. So the ennui and disgust, which had perhaps long 
b«en smothered, now burst forth. Many people refused to attend 
altogether. They sent their servants, parasites, or hired applauders, 
while they themselves strolled in the public squares or spent the 
hours in the bath, and only lounged into the room at the close of the 
performance. Their indifference at last rejected all disguise; 

* Laetam fecit cum Statius Urbem Promisitque diem, Juv. vii 8Q. 
2 Esurit intactam Paridi nisi vendit Agaven, Juv, ib. 



THE THEBAIP. 427 

absence became tbe rule. Even Trajan's assiduous attendance could 
bardly bring a scanty and listless concourse to the once crowded 
halls. Pliny the younger, who "vvas a finished reciter, grievously 
complains of the incivility shown to deserving poets. Instead of 
the loud cries, the uneasy motions that had attested the excitement 
of the hearers, nothing is heard but yaA\Tis or shulHing of the feet; 
a dead silence prevails. Even Pliny's gay spirits and cheerful 
vanity were not proof against such a reception. The "little 
grumblings " {indignatiuncuJae)^ of which his letters are full, attest 
how sorely he felt the decline of a fashion in which he was so 
eminently fitted to excel. And if a wealthy noble patronised by 
the emperor thus complains, how intolerable must have been the 
disappointment to the poet whose bread depended on his verses, 
the poet depicted by Juvenal, to whom the patron graciously lends 
a house, ricketty and barred up, lying at a distance from town, and 
lays on him the ruinous expense of carriage for benches and stalls, 
which after all are only half -filled ! 

The frenzy of public readings, then, was over ; but Statins had 
learned his style in their midst, and country retirement could not 
change it. The*whole of his brilliant epic savours of the lecture 
room. The verbal conceits, the florid ornament, the sparkling but 
quite untranslatable epigrams which enliven every description and 
give point to cA^ery speech, need only be noted in passing ; for no 
reader of a single book of the Tliebaid can fail to mark them. 

Tliis poem, which is admitted by Merivale to be faultless in epic 
execution, and has been glorified by the admiration of Dante, 
occupied the author twelve years in the composing,^ probably from 
80 to 92 A.D. Its elaborate finish bears testimony to the labour 
expended on it. Had Statius been content with trifles such as are 
sketched in the Silvae he might have been to this day a favourite 
and widely-read poet. As it is, the minute beauties of his epic lie 
buried in such a wilderness of unattractive learning and second- 
hand mythological reminiscence, that few care to seek them out. 
His mastery over the epic machinery is complete; but he fails not 
only in the ardour of the bard, but in the vigour of the mere 
narrator. His action drags heavily through the first ten books, 
and then is summarily finished in the last two, the accession of 
Creon after Oedipus's exile, his prohibition to bury Polynices, the 
interference of Theseus, and the death of Creon being all dismissed 
in fifteen hundred lines. 

The two most striking features in the poem are the descriptions 
of battles and the similes. The former are greatly superior to those 

^ Bis senos vigilataper annos, Theb. xii. 811. 



428 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

of Lncan or SiKiis. They have not the hideous combination of 
horrors of the one, nor the shadowy unreality of the other. 
Though hatched in the closet and not on the battle-field, a defect 
they share with all poets from Virgil downwards, they have 
sufficient verisimilitude to interest, and not sufficient reality to 
shock us. The similes merit still higher praise. The genius of 
Latin poetry was fast tending towards the epigram, and these 
similes are strictly cpigrammafic. The artificial brevity which 
suggests many different lines of reminiscence at the same time is 
exhibited with marked success. As the simile was so assiduously 
cultivated by the Latin epicists and forms a distinctive feature of 
their stylo, we shall give in iihe appendix to this chapter a com- 
parative table of the more important similes of the three chief epic 
poets. At present we shall quote only two from the Thehaidy 
both admirable in their way, and each exemplifying one of Statius's 
prominent faults or virtuss. The first compares an army folio wing 
its general across a river to a herd of cattle following the leading 
buU;i 

*' Ac velut ignotum si qiiando armenta per aDinem 
Pastor agit, stat triste pecns, procul altera telftis^ 
Omnibus, et late medius timor : ast nbi ductor 
Taurus init fecitque vaduin, tunc mollior nnda, 
Tunc faciles saltus, visaeque accedere i-ipae." 

This is elegant in style but full of ambiguities, if not experi- 
ments, in language. The words in italics are an exaggerated 
imitation of a mode of expression to which Virgil is prone, 2.e.,a 
psychological indication of an effect made to stand for a descrip- 
tion of the thing. Then as to the three forced expressions of the 
last two lines — to say nothing of fecit vadum, which may be a 
pastoral term, as we say inade the ford, i.e. struck it — we have 
the epithet mollior, which, here again in caricature of Virgil, 
mixes feeling with description, used for facilior in the sense of 
" kinder," " more obliging" (for he can hardly mean that it feels 
softer) ; faciles saltiis, either the *' leap across seems easier," or 
perhaps " the woods on the other side look less frowning;" while 
to add to the hyperbole, " the bank appears to come near and meet 
them." Three subtle combinations are thus expended where 
Virgil would have used one simple one. 

The next simile exemplifies the use of hyperbole at its happiest, 
an ornament, by the way, to which Statins is specially prone. It 
is a very short one.^ It compares an infant to the babe Apollo 
crawling on the shore of Delos : 

^ Theb. vii. 435, quoted by Nisard. ^ "The land on the other side.'* 

3 The reader is referred to an article on the later lioman epos by Coning- 
ton. Posthumous Works, vol, i. p. 348. 



STATIUS'S SIMILES. 429 

'* Talis per litora reptons 
Improbus Ortygiae latus inclinabat Apollo.'* 
This is delightful. The mischievous little god crawls near the 
edge of the island, and by his divine weight nearly overturns it ! 
We should observe the gross materialism of idea Avhich underlies 
this pretty picture. K"ot one of the Eoman poets is free from this 
taint. To take a well-known instance from Virgil ; when Aeneas 
gets into Charon's boat 

" Gemuit sub pondere cymba 
Sutilis et multam accepit rimosa paiudem," ^ 
The effect of th.e "Ingens Aeneas" bursting Charon's crazy skiff is 
decidedly grotesque. Lucan has not failed to seize and exaggerate 
this peculiarity. To repeat the example we have already noticed 
in the first book,^ when asking ISTero which part of heaven he is 
selecting for his abode, lie prays Mm not to clioose one far removed 
from the centre, lest his vast weight should disturb th.e balance of 
the universe ! 

" Aetheris imniensi partem si presseris iinam 
Seiitiet axis onus." 

Statins, as we have seen, adds tbe one element that was wanting, 
namely the abstraction of the heroic altogether ; nevertheless, in 
small effects of this kind, lie must be pronounced superior to both 
Virgil and Lucan. 

The Achilleis is a mere fragment, no doubt left as such owing 
to the author's early death. The design, of wbich it was the first 
instalment, was even more ambitious than that of the TItehaid. 
It aimed at nothing less than an exhaustive treatment of all the 
legends of whicb Achilles was the hero, excepting those which 
form the subject of the Iliad. Its style shows a slight advance on 
that of the earlier poem ; it is equally long-winded, but less 
bombastic, and consequently somewhat more natural. In one or 
two passages Statins^ I)romises Domitian an epic celebrating his 
deeds, but probably he never had any serious intention of fulfilling 
his word. Statins had a high opinion of his own merits, especially 
when he compared himself with the poet fraternity of his day ; 
but his careful study of Homer and Virgil had shown him that 
there was a domain into which he could not enter, and so even 
while vaunting his claims to immortality, he is careful not to 
aspire to be ranked with the poet of the Aeneid :^ 
*' Nee tu diviuain Aeneida tenta : 
Sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora," 

Valerius Martialis was born at Bilbilis, in Hispania Tarra 

1 Aen. vi. 413. ^ Phars. i. 56. 

3 Theb. i. 17 ; Ach. i. 19. * 'J'iieb. xii. 816. 



430 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

eonensis (Marcli 1, 43 a.d.), and retained tlirough. life an affec- 
tionate admiration for the place of Ms birth, which he celebrates 
in numerous poems. ^ At twenty-two^ years of age he came to 
Eome, Nero being then on the throne. He does not appear to 
have been known to that emperor, but rose into great favour with 
Titus, which was continued under Domitian, who conferred on 
him the Jus trium Uherorum^ and the tribunate, together with 
the rank of a Roman knight,* and a pension frorii the imperial 
treasury,^ probably attached to the position of court poet. It is 
difficult to ascertain the truth as to his circumstances. The facts 
above mentioned, as well as his possession of a house in the city 
and a villa at I^omentum," would point to an easy competence j 
on the other hand the poet's continual complaints of poverty '' prove 
that he was either less wealthy than his titles suggest, or else that 
he was hard to satisfy. On the accession of Trajan he seems to 
have left Eome for Spain, it is said because the emperor refused 
to recognise his genius ; but as he had been a prominent authoi 
for upwards of thirty years, it is likely that his character, not his 
telent, was what Trajan looked coldly on. A poet who had prosti- 
tuted his pen in a way unexampled even among the needy and 
immoral pickers-up of chance crumbs that crowded the avenues of 
the palace, could hardly be acceptable to a prince of manly char- 
acter. At the same time there is this excuse for Martial, that 
he did not belong to the old families of Eome. He and such as 
he owed everything to the emperor's bounty, and if the emperor 
desired flattery in return, it cost them little pains and still less loss 
of self-respect to give it. Politics had become entirely a system of 
palace intrigue. Only when the army intervened was any general 
interest awakened. The supremacy of the emperor's person was 
the one great fact, rapidly becoming a great inherited idea, which 
formed the point of union among the diverse non-political classes, 
• and gave the poets their chief theme of inspiration. It mattered 
not to them whether their lord was good or bad. It is well- 
known that the people liked Domitian, and it was only by the 
firmness of the senate that he was prevented from being formally 
proclaimed as a god. Martial does not pretend to be above the 
level of conduct which he saw practised by emperor and people 
alike. Without strength of character, without independence of 

1 As L 49, 3 ; iv. 55, 11, &c. 

2 In X. 24, 4, he tells us he is fifty-six ; in x. 104, 9, written at Rome, he 
says he has been away from Bilbilis 34 years. In xii. 31, 7, he says hia 
entire absence lasted 35 years. Now this was written in 100 a.d. 

3 iii. 94. ■* V. 13. ^ Nisard, p. 337. 
6 vii. 36. 7 i. 77, &c. 



I 



MAKTIAL. 431 



thotlglit, both of wliicTi indeed were almost extinct at this epoch, 
his one object was to ingratiate himself with those who could fill 
his purse. Hence the indifierence he shows to the vices of IsTero. 
Juvenal, Tacitus, and Pliny use a very different language. But 
then they represented the old-fashioned ideas of Eome. Martial, 
indeed, alludes to ISTero as a well-known type of crime : ^ 

" Quid Nerone peius ? 
Quid tliermis melius IS'eronianis ? 

but he has no real passion. The only thing he really hates him 
for is his having slain Lucan.^ 

Martial, then, is much on a level -with the society in which he 
finds himself; the society, that is, of those very freedmen, 
favourites, actors, dancers, and needy bards, that Juvenal has 
made the objects of his satire. And therefore we cannot expect 
him to rise into lofty enthusiasm or pure views of conduct. His 
poems are a most valuable adjunct to those of Juvenal ; for per- 
haps, if we did not possess Martial, we might fancy that the 
former's sardonic bitterness had over-coloured his picture. As it 
is, these two friends illustrate and confirm each other's state- 
ments. 

Little as his conduct agrees with the respectability of a married 
man, Martial was married twice. His first wife was Cleopatra,^ 
of whose morose temper he complains,* and from whom he ^vixs 
divorced^ soon after obtaining the Jus trium liherorum. His 
second was Marcella, whom he married after his return to Spain.*^ 
Of her he speaks with respect and even admiration.'' It is pos- 
sible that his to^^^l house and country estate were part of his first 
wife's dowry, so that on his divorce they reverted to her family; 
this would account for the otherwise inexplicable poverty in 
which he so often declares himself to be phmged. While at 
Eome he had many patrons. Besides Domitian, he numbered 
Silius Italicus, Pliny, Stella the friend of Statins, Eegulus the 
famous pleader, Parthenius, Crispinus, and Glabrio, among his 
influential friends. It is curious that he never mentions Statius. 
The most probable reason for his silence is the old one, given by 
Hesiod, but not yet obsolete : 

KoX Kepafxivs Kepa/xel KOT^ei Koi aoidhs aoidw. 

He and Statius were indisputably the chief poets of the day. One 
or other must hold the first place. We, have no means of know- 
ing how this qua,rrel, if quarrel it was, arose. Among JMartial's 

* vii. 34. 2 vii, 21. 3 iv^ 22. * xi. 104. 

^ ii. 92, 3. « So it is inferred from xii. 31. ^ xii. 21. 



432 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

otlier friends were Quintilian, Yalerius Flacciis, and JuvenaL 
His intimacy with these men, two of whom at least were emi- 
nently resjDectable, lends some support to his own statement, 
advanced to palliate the impurity of his verses : 

**Lasciva est nobis pagiua : vita proba est.'* 
The year of his death is not certain. But it must have occurred 
soon after 100 a.d. Pliny in his grand way gives an obituary 
notice of him in one of his letters/ which, interesting as all his 
letters are, we cannot do better than translate : 

" I hear with regret that Valerius Martial is dend. He was a man of 
talent, aeuteness, and spirit, with plenty of wit and gall, and as sincere as 
he was witty. I gave him a parting present when he left Rome, which was 
due both to our friendship and to some verses which he wrote in ni}'- praise. 
It was an ancestral custom of ours to enrich with honours or money thosa 
who had written the praises of individuals or cities, but among other noble 
and seemly customs this has now become obsolete. I suppose since we 
have ceased to do things worthy of laudation, we think it in bad taste to 
receive it." 

Pliny then quotes the verses, ^ and proceeds — 

'* Was I not justified in parting on the most friendly terms with one who 
wrote so prettily of me, and am I not justified now in mourning his loss as that 
of an intimate friend ? What he could he gave me ; if he had h;id more he 
would have gladly given it. And yet what gift; can be gieater than glory, 
praise, and immortality ? It is ]tossible, indeed, as I think 1 hear you sajnng, 
that his poems may not last for ever. Nevertheless, he wrote them in the 
belief that they would. " 

Martial is the most finished master of the epigram, as we under- 
stand it. Epigram is with him condensed satire. The harmless 
plays on words, sudden surprises, and neat turns of expression, 
which had satisfied the Greek and earlier Latin epigrammatists, 
were by no means stimulating enough for the hlase taste of 
Martial's day. The age cried for point, and with point Martial 
supplies it to the full extent of its demand. His pungency is 
sometimes wonderful; the whole flavour of many a sparkling 
little poem is pressed into one envenomed word, like the scorpion's 
tail whose last joint is a sting. The marvel is that with that 
biting pen of his the poet could find so many warm friends. Eut 
the truth is, he was far more than a mere sharp-shooter of wit. 
He had a genuine love of good fellowship, a warm if not a con- 
stant heart, and that happy power of graceful panegyric which 
was so specially Eoman a gift. Juveual, indeed, complains that 
the Greeks were hojDclessly above his countrymen m the art of 
praise. But this is not an opinion in which we can agree. Their 

^ iii. 21. 2 They will be found in Epig. x. 19. 



MARTIAL. 433 

fulsome adulation may indeed liave been more acceptable to the 
vulgar objects of it than that of the Roman panegyrist, who, even 
while flattering, could not -shake off the fetters of the great dialect 
in which he wrote ; but the efforts in this department by Cicero, 
Ovid, Horace, Pliny, and Martial, mast be allowed to be master- 
achievements to which it would be hard to find an equal in the 
literature of any other nation. 

Martial is one of the most difficult of Eoman authors. Scarce 
once or twice does he relax his style sufficiently to let the reader 
read instead of spelling through his poems. When he does this 
he is elegant and pleasing. The epicedion on a little girl who 
died at the age of six, is a lovely ^em that may almost bear com- 
parison with Catullus ; but then it is spoilt by the misplaced wit 
of the last few lines. ^ Few indeed are the poems of Martial that 
are natural throughout. His constant effort to be terse, to con- 
dense description into allusion, and allusion into indication, and to 
indicate as many allusions as possible by a single word, compels the 
reader to weigh each expression with scrupulous care lest he may 
lose some of the points with which every line is weighted ; and 
yet even Martial is less perfect in this respect than Juvenal. But 
then the shortness of his pieces takes away that relief which a 
longer satire must have, not. only for its author's sake, but for pur- 
poses of artistic success. He must have read Juvenal with care, and 
sometimes seems to give a decoction of his satLes.'^ It is probable 
that we do not possess all Martial's poems. It is also possible 
that many of those we possess under his name are not by him. 
The list embraces one book of Spectacula, celebrating the shows 
in wliich emperor and people took such delight ; twelve of Epi- 
grams, edited separately, and partially revised for each edition ; ^ 
two of Xenia and Apophoreta, written before the tenth book of 
Epigrams, and devoted to the flattery of Domitian. The obsceni- 
ties which defile almost every book make it impossible to read 
Martial with any pleasure, but those who desire to make his 
acquaintance will find Book IV. by far the least objectionable in 
this respect, as well as otherwise more interesting. 

At this time Eome teemed with poets ; as Pliny in one of his 
lettors tells us, people reckoned the year by the abundance of its 
poetic harvest. Turxus »seems to have been a satirist of .?o«i^«h 
note;* among others he satirised the poisoner Locusta. Scaevius 
Memor was a tragedian;^ a Hecuba, a Troades, and perhaps a 
Hercules, are ascribed to him. Yerginius Rufus wrote erotic 

1 V. 37. 

' See esp. ix, 48, as compared with Juv. ii. 1-30. 

8 X, 2 4 Mart. xi. 10. 6 Mart. ix. 9, 

9, TA 



434 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

poems, and an epigram of Ms is quoted by Pliny. ^ Yestricius 
Spueinna was a lyricist, and had been consul under Doniitian ; a 
fine account of him is given by Pliny. ^ The only Ponian poetess 
of whom we possess any fragment, belongs to this epoch, the high- 
born lady SuLPiciA. She is celebrated by Martial for her chaste 
love-elegies,^ and for fidelity to her husband Calenus. We sus- 
pect, however, that Martial is a little satiric here. For the 
epithets bestowed by other writers on Sulpicia imply warmth, 
not to say wantonness of tone, though her muse seems to have 
been constant to its legitimate flame. We possess about seventy 
hexameters bearing the title Sulpiciae Satira^ supposed to have 
been written after the banishment of all philosophers by Donii- 
tian (94 A.D.). It is a dialogue between the poetess and her 
muse : she excuses herself for essaying so slight a subject in epic 
metre, and implies that she is more at home in lighter rhythms. 
This may be believed when we find that she makes the i of iambus 
long ! However, the poem is corrupt, and the readings in many 
parts uncertain. Teuffel regards it as a forgery of the fifteenth, 
century, following Boot's opinion. It is full of harsh construc- 
tions* and misplaced epithets, but on the other hand contains 
some pretty lines. If it be genuine, its boldness is remarkable. 
Great numbers of other poets appear in the pages of Martial, 
Statins, and Pliny, but they need not be named. The fact that 
verse-writing was an innocuous way of spending one's leisure 
doubtless drove many to it. Codrus, or Cordus,^ was the author 
of an ambitious epic, the Theseid, composed on the scale, but 
without the wit, of the Tliehaid. The stage, too, engaged many 
writers. Tragedy and comedy^ were again reviving, though their 
patrons seem to have preferred recitation to acting ; mimes still 
floiirished, though they had taken the form of pantomime. We 
hear of celebrated actors of them in Juvenal, as Paris, Latinus, 
and Thymele. 

1 Ep. ix. 19, 1. 2 Ep, iii. 1. » x. 35, 1. 

•* E.g. The description of Domitian: qui res Eomanas imperat inter, Non 
trahe sed tcrgo prolapsus et ingluvie albus. The underlined expression is an 
iuiitation of Aristophanes' Nub. 1275, ovk airh hoKov dAA.' onr' ovov, i.e. oirb 
vou, "He fell not from a beam, but from a donkey." 

* Juv, i. 2. * ib. 3, recitavcriC iiie togata^ 6iC 



APPE^"DIX. 



435 



APPENDIX. 

On the Similes of Virgil, Lucan, and Stafiics. 



The Roman epicists bestowed great 
elaboration on their similes, and as 
a rule imitated them from a certain 
limited number of Greek originals. 
In Virgil but a few are original, i.e., 
taken from things he had himself 
witnessed, or feelings he had known, 
Lucan is less imitative in form, and 
he first used with any frequency the 
simile founded on a recollection of 
some well-known passage of Greek 
literature or conception of Greek art. 
In this Statius follows him; the 
simile of the infant Apollo noticed 
in this chapter is a good instance. 

We give a few examples of the 
treatment of a similar subject by the 
three poets. We first take the 
simile of a storm, described by Virgil 
in the first Aeneid, and alluded toby 
the other two poets (Lucan i. 493): 

" Qualis cum tuibidus auster 
Eepulit e Libycis imniensum syrtibus aequor 
Fracraque veliferi sonuerunt pondera niali, 
Desilir in flucius deseita pujipe niagister 
Kavitaque, et nondum sparsa compage car- 

iiiae 
Jfau/ragium sibi quisque facit." 

Here we have no great elaboration, 
but a good point at the finish. 
Statius (Theb. i. 370) is more subtle 
but more commonplace : 
'* Ac velut hibevno deprensus navita ponto, 
Cui ncque Timo piger, nee amico sidere 

monstrat 
Luna vias, medio caeli pelagique tumultu 
Stat rationis inops; iam iamque aut saxa 

malifjiiis 
Expectat submersa vadis, aut vertice acuto 
Spumantes scopulos erectae incuixere pro- 
rae." 

The next simile is that of a shep- 
herd robbing a nest of wild bees. It 
occurs in Virgil and Statius. Virgil's 
description is (Aen. xii. 587) — 
" Inclusas ut cum latebroso in pumice pastor 
Vfcstigavit apes, fumnque implevit amaio ; 
Illae intus tiepidae reium per cerea castra 
Discununt, magnisque acuunt stiidoribus 

iias; 
Vclvitu!- ater odor tectis; turn munniire 

cacco 
Intus saxa sonant: vacuas it fumus ad 
auras." 

That of Statius (Th. x. 574) presents 



characteristic refinemeuts on 
its original : 

" Sic ubi pumiceo pastor rapturus ab antro 
Armatas erexit apes, fremit aspera uubes: 
Inque vicem sese stiidore hortautui- et 

omnes 
Hostis in era volant; mox deficientibus alis 
Amplexae flavanique domum eaptivaque 

plangunt 
Mella, laboiatasque premunt ad pectora 
ceras." 

The smoke which is the agent of 
destruction is described by Viigil : 
obscurely hinted at in Statius by the 
single epithet "deficientibus." 

The next example is the descrip- 
tion of a landsli]) by the same two. 
Virg. Aen. xii. 682. 
" Ac veluti montis saxum de vertice praeceps 

Quum ruit avolsum vento, seu tuibidus 
imber 

Proluit, aut annis solvit sublapsa vetustas, 

Feitur in abruptum vasto mons impiobus 
actu, 

Exsultatque solo, silvas armenta virosque 

Involvens secum." 

The copy is found Stat. Theb. vii. 
744: 

"Sic ubi mibiferum montis latus aut nova 
ventis 
Solvit hiems aut victa situ non pertulit 

aetiis; 
Desilit lioirendus campo timor, arma vir- 
osque 
Limitc 11071 uno longaevaque robora secum 
Piaecipitans, tandemque exhaustus turbine 

fesso 
Aut vail em cavat, aut medios intercipit 
amnes." 

The additions are here either exagge- 
rations, trivialities, or ingenious adap- 
tations of other passages of Virgil. 

The next is a thunderstorm from 
Virgil and Lucan, (^n, xii. 451) : 
" Qualis ubi ad terras abrupto sidere nimbus 
It mare per medium; miseris, heu, praescia 

longe 
Horrescunt corda agricolis ; dabit ille ruinas 
Arboribus stragemque satis, raet omnia 

late; 
Antevolant sonitumque ferunt .ad litora 
venii." 

The simile of Lucan, which describes 
one disastrous flash rather than a 
storm (Phars. i. 150) refers to Caesar : 
" Qualiter expressum ventis per nubila ful- 
men 
Aetberis impuisi sonitu mundi que fragore, 



436 



HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 



Emicuit, rupUqie diem, populosque paventes 
TeiTUit, obliqua piaestiiugens liimina 

flamnia: 
In sua templa furit, nullaque exire vetante 
3>Iat,ena, magnamque cadens, maguamque 

reverteus 
Dat stragera late, sparsosquerecolligitignes." 

No comparison is more common in 
Latin poetry than that of a warrior 
to a bull. All the three poets have 
introduced tliis, some of them several 
times. The instances we select will 
be Tirg. iEn. xii. 714 : 

"Ac velut ingenti Sila summove Taburno 
Cum duo conversis iniiuica in proelia tauri 
FrontibusincuiTuntjpavidiCfsseremagistii, 
Stat pecus omne metu mutum inussaiitque 

iuvencae, 
Quis neinori imperitet, quern tota annenta 

sequantur." 

Lncan's simile is borrowed largely 
from the Georgics. It is, however, 
a fine one (Phars. ii. 601): 

"Pulsus ut armentis primo certamine taiirus 
Sil varum .secveta petit, vacuosque peragros 
Exul in adversis explorat coinua truncis; 
Nee rudit in pastus nisi quum ceivice re- 

cepta 
Excusisi placuere tori; mox reddita victor 
Quoslibet in saltus comitantibus agmina 

tauris 
Invito pastore trahit." 

That of Statius is in a similar strain 
('i'heb. xi. 251): 

"Sic ubi regnatnr post exulis otia tauri 
Mugituui liostilem summatuiit aureiuven- 

cus, 
Agnovitque minas, magna stnt fervidus ira 
Ante gretcfm, spuniisque animos ardenti- 

bus effert, 
Nunc pedetorvus humum nunc comibus 

aera lindens. 
Horret ager, trepidaeque expectant proelia 

valles." 

How immeasura'bly does Virgil's de- 
scription in its unambitious truth 
exceed these two fine but bombastic 
imitations ! 

These exan)ples will suffice to show 
that each poet kept his predecessors in 
his eye, and tried to vie with them in 
drawing a similar picture. But the 
similes are not always taken from the 
common-place book. Virgil, who re- 
serves nearly all his similes for the last 
six books, occasionally strikes an ori- 
ginal key. Such are (or appear) the 
similes of the sedition quelled by an 
orator (i. U8), the top (vii. 378), the 



labyrinth (v. 588), the housewife (viii. 
407), and the fall of the pier at Baiae 
(ix. 707) ; perhaps also of the swal- 
low (xii. 473) ; mythological similes 
are common in him, but not so much 
so as in Lucan and Statius. We huve 
those of the Amazons (xi. 659), of 
Mars* shield in Thrace (xii. 331), con- 
densed by Statius {Thcb. vi. 665), of 
Orestes (iv. 471), copied by Lucan 
{Fh. vii. 777). 

The lion, as may be supposed, fur- 
nishes many. We subjoin a further 
list which may be useful to the 
reader. 

The Lion — Aen. xii. 4 ; x. 722 ; ix. 
548(?). Phars. i. 206. Tlieb. ii. 
675 ; iv. 494 ; v. 598 ; vii. 670 ; viii. 
124 ; ix. 739, and perhaps v. 231. 

The SerjMnt, dragon, d-c. — Aen. xi. 
751 ; V. 273. Theb. v. 599 ; xi. 310. 

Mythological — Phars. ii. 715 ; iv. 
549; vii. Ii4. Theb. ii. 81; iv. 
140 ; xii. 224, 270. 

The Sea—Aex). xi. 624 ; vii. .^36 (?). 
Theb. i. 370 ; iii, 255 ; vi. 777 ; vii. 
864. 

The Winds— Aen.x. S56. Phars. i. 
493. Theb. i. 194 ; iii. 432 ; v. 704. 

The Boar— Mil. x. 707. Theb. 
viii. 533. 

Trees — Aen. ix. 675. Phars. i, 
136. Theb. viii. 545. 

Birds — Aen. v. 213 ; xii. 473 ; xi. 
721 ; vii. 699. Theb. ix. 858 ; xii. 
15. 

We may note detached similes like 
that of the light reflected in water, 
Aen. viii. 15, imitated in Theb. vi. 
578 ; that of the horse from Homer, 
Aen. xi. 491, which Statius has nafc 
dared to imitate ; and others not re- 
ferable to any of the above groups 
nay easily be found. It is clear that 
Virgil and Statius attached more 
importance to this ornament than 
Lucan. Their veibal elaboration was 
greater, and thus they both excel 
him. A careful study of all the 
similes in Latin poetry woul# bring 
to light some interesting facts of 
literary criticism. That descriptive 
power in which all the Komans e^^- 
celled is nowhere moi'e striking tlian 
in these short and pleasing cameos. 



CHAPTER VH 

The Eeigns of J^erva and Trajan (96-117 a.d.) 

The death of Domitian was the end of tyranny in Eome. Und»' 
Nerva a new regime was inaugurated. Liberty of speech ancf 
action was allowed, and authors were not slow to profit by it. 
The forced repression of so many years had matured, not quenched, 
the taleut of the greatest writers. Vii'tuous men had pondered in 
gloomy silence over the wickedness of the time, and they now 
gave to the world the condensed result of their bitter reflections. 
Amid the numerous talents of the period three have sent down 
to us a large portion of their works. These three are all Amters 
of the highest inark, and two of them of commanding genius. 
For grace, urbanity, and polish, Pliny yields only to Cicero ; for 
realistic intensity directed to a satiric pui^pose, Juvenal yields to 
no writer whatever ; for piercing insight into the human heart and 
an imagination which casts its characters as in a white-hot furnace, 
Tacitus well deserves the name of Pome's greatest historian. 
Chi'onologically speaking, Pliny is posterior to the other two. 
Eut he is so good a type of this comparatively happ}'' age that he 
may well come before us first. The other two, occupied with 
past regrets, reflect in their tone of mind an earlier time. 

C. Plinius Caecilius Secundus, the nephew of Pliny the 
elder, was born at JSTovocomumi 62 a.d. When he was eiglit 
years old his father died, and two years after his uncle adopted 
him. In the interim he was assigned to the care of his guardian, 
that Yirginius Eufus of whom Tacitus deigned to be the pane- 
gyrist. He was brought early to Eome, and placed under Quin- 
tilian and other celebrated teachers, among whom was Nicetes of 
Smyrna, one of the foremost rhetoricians of the day. He served 
his first campaign in Syria, but seems to have given his time to 
philosophy more than soldiering. He was even more emphatically 
a man of peace than Cicero, and it is not easy to fancy him 
wielding the sword, though Ave can well picture him to ourselves 
resplendent in full dress uniform, well satisfied with his appear- 

1 Conin. 



438 HTSTORY OF ROMAN LITER ATUEE. 

ance, and trying his "best to assume the martial air. While in 
Asia he spent much time with the old philosopher Euphrates, of 
whose daily life he has given a pleasing description in the tenth, 
letter of his first book. 

On his return he studied for the bar, and pleaded with success. 
He passed through the several offices of state, and prided himself 
not a little on the fact that he attained the consulate and pontifi- 
cate at an earlier age than Cicero. Soniewhat later he was elected to 
the college of augurs, an honour which prompts him to remind the 
world that Cicero had been augur too ! In 98 a. d., when Trajan had 
been two years emperor, Pliny was raised for the second time to 
the consulate, and was admitted to some share of his sovereign's 
confidence. The points, it is true, on which he was consulted 
were not of the most important, but he was extremely pleased, 
and has recorded his pleasure in more than one of his charming 
letters. In 103 he was sent to fill the office of proconsul in 
Pontus and Bithynia ; and while there, ha kept up the interesting 
correspondence with Trajan, to which the tenth book of his 
letters is devoted. 

Though eloquence was not what it had been, it still remained 
the highest career that an ambitious man could adopt. Even under 
the tyrants it had served as the keenest weapon of attack, the 
surest buckler of defence. The jpuUic accusation, which had once 
been the stepping-stone to fame, had changed its name, and 
become delation. And he who hoped to parry its blows must 
needs have been able to defend himself by the same means. 
Pliny was ahead of all his rivals in both departments of eloquence. 
He was the most telling pleader before the centumviral tribunal, 
and he was the boldest orator in the revived debates of the 
senate. His best forensic speech, his De Corona, as he loved to 
style it, was that on behalf of Accia Variola, a lady unjust^/ disin- 
herited by her father, whom Pliny's eloquence reinstated in her 
rights. In the senate Pliny rose to even higher eff^orts. He 
rejoiced to plead the cause of injured provinces against the extor- 
tion of rapacious governors, who (as Juvenal tells us) pillaged the 
already exhausted wealth of their helpless victims. On more than 
one occasion Pliny's boldness Avas crowned with success. Caecilius 
Classicus, who had ground down the Baeticenses, was so powerfully 
impeached by him that, to avoid conviction, he sought a voluntary 
death, and what was better, the confiscated property was returned 
to its owners. The still worse criminal, Marius Priscus, who in 
exile "enjoyed the anger of the gods,"^ was compelled by Pliny 
and Tacitus to disgorge no small portion of his plunder. When 
1 Juv. i. 49. 



PLINY THE YOUNGER. 



439 



carried away hj his subject Pliny spoke with such vehemence as 
to endanger his deUcate lungs, and he teUs us with no small com.- 
placency that the emperor sent him a special message "to he 
careful of his health." But his greatest triumph was the accusa- 
tion of Pub'licius Certus, a senator, and expectant of the consul- 
ship. The fathers, long used to servitude, could not understand 
the freedom with which Pliny attacked one of their own body, 
and at first they tried to chill him into silence. But he was not 
to be daunted. He compeUed them to listen, and at last so roused 
them by his fervour that he gained his point. It is true that he 
risked neither life nor fortune by his boldness ; but none the less 
does he deserve honour for having recalled the senate to a tardy 
sense of its position and responsibilities. 

Koman eloquence was now split into two schools or factions, one 
of which favoured the ancient style, the other the modern. Pliny 
was the champion of reaction : Tacitus the chief representative of 
the modern tendency. Unfortunately, Pliny's best oratory has per- 
ished, but we can hardly doubt that its brilliant wit and courtly 
finish would have impressed us less than they did the ears of those 
who heard him. One specimen only of his oratorical talent 
remains, the panegyric add^-essed to Trajan. This was admitted 
to be in his happiest vem, and it is replete with point and elegance. 
The impression given on a first reading is, that it is full also of 
flattery. This, however, is not in reality the case. Allowing for 
a certain conventionality of tone, there is no flattery in it ; that 
is, there is nothing that goes beyond truth. But Plmy has the 
unhappy talent of speaking truth in the accents of falsehood. 
Like Seneca, he strikes us in this speech as too clever for his 
audience. Still, with all its faults, his oratory must have made an 
epoch, and helped to arrest the decline for at least some years. 

It is on his letters that Pliny's fame now rests, and both in tone 
and style they are a moniunent that does him honour. They show 
him to have been a gentleman and a man of feeling, as well as a wit 
and courtier. They were deliberately written with a view to 
publication, and thus can never have the unique and surpassing 
interest that belongs to those of Cicero. But they throw so much 
light on the contemporary history, society, and literature, that no 
student of the age can acford to neglect them. They are arranged 
neither according to time nor subject, but on an aesthetic plan of 
their author's, after the fashion of a literary nosegay. As extracts 
from several have already been given, we need not enlarge on 
them here. Their language is extremely pure, and almost entirely 
free from that poetical colouring which is so conspicuous in con- 
temporary and subsequent prose-writing. 



440 HISTOEY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

The tenth book possesses a special interest, as containing the 
correspondence between Pliny wliile governor of Eithynia and the 
emperor Trajan, to whose judgment almost every question that 
arose, however insignificant, was referred.i As he says in his 
Irank way : "Solemne est mihi, Domine, omnia de quibus dubito 
ad te referre."2 The letter which opens with these words is the 
celebrated one on the sublet of the Christians. Perhaps it may 
not be out of place to translate it, as a highly significant mtness 
ot the relations between the emperors and their confidential ser- 
vants. It runs thus : — 

Jr.\lf "'7' ^^'1""^'^ ''^^ *^' *"^^ ^^ ^ Christian ; hence I knew not what 
were the usual questions asked them, or what the punishments inflicted. I 
olH . ,i V\lf / *"i,"'^^' ^ distinction of oges, or to treat young and 
dahke; whether to alow space for recantation, or to refuse all pardon 
whatever to one who had been a Christian; whether, finally, to make the 
^itr L?. 7 ' . -"^^i u" fi°i^/ho"l<i be proved, or to reserve the penalty for 
r ni^fi^nf T f'n "^ Y}- ^^^^^^^I^'l^' ^vhen any were reported to me as 
thustians. I followed this plan. I asked them whether they were Chris- 
tians. If they said yes, I repeated the question twice, adding threats 
of punishment ; it they persisted, I ordered punishment to be inflicted. For 
.itl?/t ; whatever it was they confessed, their inflexible obstinacy well 
deserved to be chastised. There were even some Roman citizens who showed 
lus strange persistence; those J determined to send to Rome. As often 
^appens in cases of interference, charges were now lodged more generally than 
before, and several forms of guilt came before me. An anonymous letter was 
wp ; nl^'i Tr^ nf "^^"^'^ ^^" "'^"'^ V^^'som, who, however, denied that they 
we e 01 had been Christians. As they invoked the gods and worshipped with ' 
wine and frankineense before your image, at the same time cursing Christ, 
be totTn I the more readily, as those who are really Christians cannot 
be got to do any of th.se things. Others, who were named to me, admitted 
;i tliey were Christians, but immediately afterwards denied it ; some said 
ti)ey had been so throe years ago, others at still more distant dates, one or 

If Th? ll^ '^°/' K-"^'"^/ ^f '• ^^^ ^^'''' worshipped your image and those 
of the gods, and abjured Christ. But they declared that all their guilt or 
eiror had amounted to was this : they met on certain mornings before day- 
hi .T'h' """Ji '^"^ one after another a hymn to Christ as God, at the same time 
binding themselves by an oath not to comnut any crime, but to abstain from 
theft, robbery adultery, perjury, or repudiation of trust ; after this was 
done, the meeting broke up ; they, however, came together again to eat their 
meal in common, being quite guiltless of any improper conduct!^ But since my 
edict forbidding (as you ordered) all secret societies, they had given this prac- 
tice up. However, I thought it necessary to apply the torture to some young 
women who weveca]hdviimstrae,^ in order, if possible, to find out the truth? 
J^>ut 1 could elicit nothing from them except evidence of some "debased and 
immoderate superstition ; so I deferred the trial, and determined to ask your 
advice. J^or the matter seemed important, especially since the number of 

^ The correspondence dates from 97 to 108 a.d. s ^ qq /g^x 

This refers to the malicious charges of acts of cruelty performed at the 
common meal, often brought against the early believers. 
Probably deaconesses, 



PLINY THE YOUNGER. 441 

those who run into danger increases daily. All ages, all ranks, and both 
eexes are among the accused, and the taint of the superstition is not confined 
to the towns ; it has actually made its way into the villages. But I believe it 
possible to check and repress it. At all events it is certain thai ten^ples 
which were lately almost em})ty are now well atterded, and sacred festivals 
long disused are being revived. Victims too are tlowing in, whereas a few 
years ago such things could scarcely find a purchaser. From this I infer that 
vast numbers might be reformed if an opportunity of recantation were allowed 
them." 

Trajan's reply, brief, clear, and to tlie point, as all his letters 
are, is as follows : — 

"I entirely approve of your conduct with regard to those Christians of 
whom you had received information. We can never lay down a universal 
rule, as if circumstances were always the same. They are not to be searidied 
for ; but if they are reported and convicted, they must be punished. But if 
any denies his Christianity and proves his words by sacrificing to our divinity, 
even though his former conduct may have laid him under suspicion, he must 
be allowed the benefit of his recantation. No W'eight whatever should be 
attached to anonymous communications ; they are no Eoman way of deal- 
ing, and are altogether reprehensible." 

Pliny died in 113. He shone in nearly every department of 
literature, and thought himself no inelegant poet. His vanity has 
led him to record some of his verses, but they only show that he 
had little or no talent in this dh^ection. His long and prosperous 
life was marked by no reverse. Popular a^iong his equals, splen- 
did in his political successes, in his vast wealth, and his friendchip 
wi;kh the eraperor, Pliny is ahnost a perfect type of a refined pagan 
gentleman. In some ways he reminds us of Xenophon. He was 
in complete harmony with his age ; he had neither the harassing 
thoughts of Seneca, nor the querulousness of his uncle, nor the 
settled gloom of Tacitus, to overcast his bright and happy dispo- 
sition. Few works in all antiquity are more pleasing than his 
friendly correspondence. We learn from it the names of a large 
number of orators and oftier distinguished literary men, of whom, 
indeed, Eome was full. Yocon.ius Eomanus,^ Salvius Liberalis,^ 
C. FANNiuSj'^and ClaudiusPollio,^ were among themost renowned. 
They are mentioned as pos;?essing every gift that could contribute 
to the highest eloquence ; b«t as Pliny's good nature leads him to 
praise all his friends indiseriminately, we cannot lay much stress 
on his opinion. In jurisprudence we meet with Priscus Nera- 
Tius, JuvEXTius Celsus, and Javolexus Priscus. The two 
former were men of mark, and obtained the consulate. The last 
was less distinguished, and had the misfortune to offend Pliny by 
au ill-timed jest.^ Once, when Statins had given a reading, and 

» Ep. II. 13, 4. ' Fp. IT. 11, 19. ^ Fp. V. 5, 1. 

4 Ep VII. 31, 5. » Ep. VI. 15. 



442 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

had just left tlie hall, the audience asked Passienus Paulus, who 
had a manuscript ready, to take his place. Paulus was somewhat 
diffident, but finally consented, and began his poem with the 
words, " You bid me. Prisons . . . ," on which Javolenus, who was 
sitting near, called out, " You mistake ! I do not bid you! " The 
audience greeted this sally with a laugh, and so put an end to the 
unlucky Paulus's recitation. Pliny contemptuously remarks that it 
is doubtful whether Javolenus was quite sane, but admits that there 
are people imprudent enough to trust their business to him.^ We 
may think a single jest is somewhat scanty evidence of dementia. 

Grammar was in this reign actively pursued. Flavius Caper 
was the author of a treatise on orthography, and another " on 
doubtful words," both of which we possess. He seems to have 
been a learned man, and is often quoted by the grammarians of 
the fourth and fifth centuries. Velius Longus also -wrote on 
orthography, and, as we learn from Gellius, a treatise De Usu 
Antiquae Ledionis. All the chief grammarians now exercised 
themselves on the interpretation of Virgil, who was fast rising 
into the position of an oracle in nearly every department of learn- 
ing, an elevation which, in the time of Macrobius, he had com- 
pletely attained. Of scientific writers we possess in part the works 
of three ; that of Hyginus on munitions, and another on bound- 
aries (if indeed this last be his), which are based on good autho- 
rities; that of Balbus On the Elementary Notions of Geometry ; 
and perhaps that of Sigulus Flaccus, De Condicionihus Agrorum, 
all of which are of importance towards a knowledge of Eoman sur- 
veying. It is doubtful whether Flaccus lived under Trajan, but 
in any case he cannot be placed later than the beginning of 
Hadrian's reign. 

The only poet of the time of Trajan who has reached us, but 
one of the greatest in Roman literature, is D. Junius Juvenalis 
(46-130] A.D.). He was born during the reign of Claudius, and 
thus spent the best years of his life under the regime of the worst 
emperors. His parentage is uncertain, but he is said to have been 
either the son or the adopted son of a rich freedman, and a passage 
in the third Satire ^ seems to point to Aquinum as his birth-place. 
"We have unfortunately scarcely any knowledge of his life, a point 
to be the more regretted, as we might then have pronounced with 
confidence on his character, which in the Satires is completely 
veiled. An inscription placed by him in the temple of Ceres 
Helvina, at Aquinum (probably in the reign of Domitian), has 

^ Au exhaustive list of these minor authors vnW be found in TeullleJ, 
§336-339. Mil 819. 



LIFE OF JUVENAL. 443 

been publislied "by Mommsen. It contains one or two biograpliical 
notices, which show that he held positions of considerable im- 
portance.^ We have also a memoir of him, attributed to Sue- 
tonius by some, but to Probus by Yalla, which tells us that until 
middle life he practised declamation as an amateur, neither plead- 
ing at the bar nor opening a rhetorical school. We are informed 
also that under Domitiaa he wrote a satire on the pantomime Paris, 
which Avas so highly approved by his friends that he determined 
to give himself to poetry. He did not, however, publish until 
the reign of Trajan. It was in the time of Hadrian that some of 
his verses on an actor ^ were recited, probably, by the populace 
in a theatre, in consequence of which the poet, now eighty years 
of age, was exiled under the specious pretext of a military com- 
mand, the emperor's favourite player having taken offence at the 
allusion. Prom a reference to Egypt in one of his later satires,^ 
the scholiast came to the conclusion that this was the place of his 
exile. But it is more hkely to have been Britain, though in this 
case the relegation would have taken place under Trajan.* He 
appears to have died soon after from disgust, though here the 
two accounts diflfer, one bringing him back to Eome, and making 
him survive until the time of Antoninus Pius. The obvious 
inference from all this is that we know very little about the 
matter. In default of external evidence we might turn to the 
Satires themselves, but here the most careful sifting can find 
nothing of importance. The great vigour of style, however, 
which is conspicuous in the seventh Satire makes it clear that it 
was not the work of the poet's old age. Hence the Caesar re- 
ferred to cannot be Hadrian. He must, therefore, be some earlier 
emperor, and there can be little doubt it is Trajan. Under 
Trajan, then, we place the maturity of Juvenal's genius as it is 
displayed in the first ten Satires. The four following ones shoAV a 
falling off in concentration and dramatic power, and are no doubt 
later productions, when years of good government had softened 
his asperity of mind. The fifteenth, sixteenth, and to a certain 
extent the twelfth, show unmistakable signs of senility. The 
fifteenth contains evidence of its date. The consulship of 
Juncus (127 A. D.) is mentioned as recent.^ We may therefore 
safely j)lace the Satire within the two following years. Tlie srx- 

1 It runs : Cereri sacrum D. Junius Juvenalis tribunus cohortis I. Delnia- 
tarum, II. vir quinquennalis llamen Divi Vespasiaui vovit dedieavitque sua 
pecunia. See Teuffel, § 326. 

2 Perhaps vii. 90. ^ xv. 45. 

-A So, at least, says the author of the statement. But the coliort of which 
Juvanal was prefect was in Britain A.n. 124 under Hadrian. See Teuflfel. 
^ Nu-per consulc Junco, xv. 27. Others read Junio. 



444 KISTOKY OF KOMAN LITEKATURE. 

teenth, wMdi treats of the privileges of military service, a very 
promising subject, has often been thought spurious, but without 
sufficient reason. The poet speaks of himself as a civilian, ap- 
pearing to have no goodwill towards the camp, and as Juvenal 
had been in the army, it is argued that he Avould scarcely have 
written fo. But to this it may be replied that Juvenal chose the 
subject for its literary capabilities, not from any personal feeling. 
As an expert rhetorician, he could not fail to see the humorous 
side of the relations between militaire and civilian. The feeble- 
ness of the style, and certain differences from the diction usual 
with the author, are not sufficient to found an argument upon, and 
have besides been much exaggerated. They would apply equally, 
and even with greater force, to the fifteenth. 

The words " ad mediam fere aetatem dedamavit" as Martha 
has justly remarked, form the key to Juvenal's literary position. 
He is the very quintessence of a declaimer, but a declaiiner of a 
most masculine sort. Boileau characterises him in two epigram- 
matic lines : 

"Juvenal eleve dnns les cris de I'ecole 
Poussa jusqu' a I'exces son mordant hyperbole." 

Poet in the highest sense of the word he certainly is not. The 
love of beauty, Avhich is the touchstone of the poetic soul, is ab- 
sent from his Avorks. He rather revels in depicting horror and 
ugliness. But the other qualification of the poet, viz. a mastery 
of words,! YiQ possesses to a degree not surpassed by any Koman 
writer, and in intensity and terseness of language is perhaps 
superior to all. Not an epithet is wasted, not a synonym idle. 
As much is pressed into each verse as it can possibly be made to 
bear, so that fully to appreciate the Satires it is necessary to have 
a commentary on every line. Even now, after the immense 
erudition that has been expended on him, many passages remain 
obscure, not only in respect to allusions, but even in matters of 
language. 2 The tension of his style, which is never relaxed,^ repre- 
sents not only great effort, but long-matured and late-born thought 
In the angry silence of forty years had been formed that fierce and 
almost brutal directness of description which paints, as has been 
well said, with a vividness truly horrible. In preaching virtue, 
he first frightens away modesty. There is scarce one of his poems 
that does not shock even where it rebukes. And three of them 



^ Coleridge's definition of poetry as " the best words in their right places" 
may be fitly alluded to here. It occurs in the Table Talk. 
2iv,128 ; viii. 6, 7 ; xv. 75. 
^ Except in his poorer satires ; certainly never in i. ii. iii. iv. vi. vii. viii. 



GREAT POWER OF JUVENAL'S SATIRE. 445 

are so hideous in their wonderful power that it is impossible to 
read them with any pleasure, though one of these (the sixth) 
is perhaps the most vigorous piece of writing in the entire Latin 
language. For compressed power it may be compared to tiie 
first chorus of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, but here the like- 
ness ceases. While the Athenian, even among dreadful scenes, 
rises to notes of sweet and almost divine pathos, the Eoman s 
dark picture is not relieved by one touch of the beautiful, or one 
reminiscence of the ideal. 

The question naturally arises, What led Juvenal to write poetry 
after being so long content with declamation % He partly answers 
us in his first Satire, where he tells us that it is in revenge for the 
poetry that has been inflicted on himself : 

"Semper ego auditor tantum imnquamne reponam?" 

But it arises also from a higher motive — 

"Facit indignatio versum 
Qualemcunque potest, quales ego vel Cluvienus." 

These two qualities, vexation {vexatus toties, i. 2) and indignation, 
are the salient characteristics of Juvenal. How far the vexation 
was righteous, the indignation sincere, is a question hard to 
answer. There is no denying the power with which they are 
expressed. But to submit to this power is one thing, to sift its 
author's heart is another. After a long and careful study of 
Juvenal's poems, we confess to being able to make nothing of 
Juvenal himself. We cannot get even a glimpse of him. He 
never doffs the iron mask, the " riaidi censura caclunni ; " he has 
80 long hidden his face that he is afraid to see it himself or to let 
it be seen. Some have thought that in the eleventh and twelfth 
Satires they can find the man, and have been glad to figure him as 
genial, simple, and kind. But it is by no means certain that even 
these are not mere rhetorical exercises, modelled on the Horatian 
epistles, but themselves having no relation to any actual event. 
The fifteenth, again, represents a softer view of life, the thirteenth 
and fourteenth a higher faith in providence ; in these, it has been 
thought, appears the true nature, which had allowed itself to lie 
liid among the denunciations of the earlier satires. But, in truth, 
the character of Juvenal must be one of the incognita of literature. 
It is a retaliation on Satire's part for the intimate knowledge she 
had allowed us to gain of Horace and Persius through tlicir works.i 
In manner Juvenal is the most original of poets ; in matter he 

1 Tlic close intimacy between Juvenal ,vnd Martial is no gieat tcstinioii} iu 
favour of Juvenal. See Mart. vii. 24. 



446 mSTOKY OF koman literatuee. 

is the glorifier of common-place. His strengtli lies in Ms pre- 
judices. He is not a moralist, but a Roman moralist; tlie vices 
^e laslies are not lashed as vices simplidter, but as vices that 
Koman ethics condemn. This one-sided patriotism is the key to 
all ius ideas. In an age which had seen Seneca, Juvenal can 
revert to the patriotism of Cato. The burden of his complaints is 
given in the third Satire : ^ 

" ISTon possum ferre Quirites 
Graecam Urbem. " ^ 

mne the Greeks lead fashion, the old Eoman virtues can never 
be restored. If only men could be disabused of their strange 
reverence lor all that is Greek, society might be reconstructed. 
The keen satirist scents a real danger; in half a century from his ' 
death Rome had become a Greek city. 

In estimating the political character of Juvenal's satire we must 
not attach too much weight to his denunciation of former tyrants. 
In the fii;st place " f^mTzmarfe " was a common-place of the 
schools : 2 Xerxes, Periander, Phalaris, and all the other despots of 
history, had been treated in rhetoric as they had treated others in 
reality; Juvenal s tirade was nothing new, but it was something 
much more powerful than had yet been seen. In the second 
place the pohcy of Irajan encouraged abuse of his predecessors. 
He could hardly claim to restore the Republic unless he showed 
how the Republic had been overthrown. Pliny, the courtly flat- 
terer, IS far more severe on Domitian than Juvenal ; and in truth 
such severity was only veiled adulation. Wlien Juvenal ridicules 
the senate of Domitian,^ we may beheve that he deshed to stimu- 
late to independence the senate of his day; and when he speaks 
ot Irajan it is m language of enthusiastic praise.^ Flattery it is 
not, tor Juvenal is no sycophant, nor would Trajan have liked 
him better if he had been one. Indeed, with all his invective he 
keeps strictly to truth; his painting of the emperors is from the 
hie. _ It IS highly coloured, but not out of drawing. Juvenal's 
T)omitian is nearer to history than Tacitus's Tiberius. 

It IS in his delmeations of society that Juvenal is at his greatest. 
Ihere is nothing ideal about him, but his pictures of real hfe 
allowing for their glaring lights, have an almost overpowering 
truthfulness. Every grade of society is made to furnish matter 

iji" ^f ^^*i^ scenes. The degenerate noble is piUoried in the 
eighth, the cringmg parasite in the fifth, the vicious hypocrite m 
^ iii. 61 ; cf. vi. 186, sqq. 

I Cumperimit saevos classis numerosa tvrannos, vii. 151. 
^^^' 1^- * 11). vii. 1-24. 



JUVENAL A PATEIOT. 447 



I 

* lie touclies on contemporary themes. His, genius was formed in 
j the past and feeds on bitter memories. As he says, he " kills the 
j dead."i To attack the living is neither pleasant nor safe. Still, 
in the historic incidents he resuscitates, a piercing eye can read a 
reference to the present. Hadrian's favourite actor saw himself 
in Paris. Freedmen and upstarts could read their original in 
Sejanus.2 Frivolous noblemen could feel their follies rebuked in 
the persons of Lateranus and Damasippus.^ Even an emperor 
might find his lesson in the gloomy pictures of Hannibal and 
Alexander.* So constant is this reference to past events that 
Juvenal's writings may be called historic satire, as those of Tacitus 
satiric history. 

The exaggeration of Juvenal's style if employed in a different way 
might have led us to suspect him of less honesty of purpose than he 
reaUy has. As it is, the very violence of his prejudices betrays an 
earnestness which, if his views had been more elevated, we might 
have thought feigned. A man might pretend to enthusiasm for 
truth, or holiness ; he would hardly pretend to enthusiasm for 
national exclusiveness,^ or for the dignity of his own profession. <^ 
When Juvenal attacks the insolent parvenu,'' the Eithynian or 
Cappadocian knight, ^ the Greek adventurer who takes everything 
out of the Eo man's hands,^ the Chaldean impostor, ^^ we may be 
sure he means what he says. 

It is true that all his accusations are not thus limited in their 
scope. Some are no doubt inspired by moral indignation ; and 
the language in which they are expressed is noble and weU de- 
serves the praise universally accorded to it. But in other instances 
his patriotism obscures his moral sense. For example, the rich 
upstarts against whom he is perpetually thundering, are by no 
means all worthy of blame. Very many of them have obtained 
their wealth by honourable commerce, which the nobles were too 
proud to practise, and the rewards of which they yet could not 
see reaped without envy and scorn. ^^ The increasing importance 
of the class of lihertim, so far from being an unmixed evil, as 
Juvenal thinks it, Avas productive of immense good. It was the 
first step towards the breaking down of the party-Avall of pride 
which, if persisted in, must have caused the premature ruin of 

^ Experiar quid concedatur in illos Quorum Flaminia tegitur cinis atque 
Latin a, i. 170. 

2x. 66. ^viii. 147. * x. Ii7, sqq. 

« iii. 61, 86, 7. ^ vii. pass. ^ 1. 32, 158. 

8 vii. 16. 9 iii. 77-104. w vi. 562, et al. 

^^ See especially iii. 30-44. 



448 HISTORY OF BOM AN LITERATURE. 

the Empire. It familiarised men's minds with ideas of equalitv. 
and prepared the way for the elevation to the citizenship of those 
vast masses of slaves who were fast becoming an anachronism. 

Popular feeling was ahead of men like Juvenal and Tacitus in 
these respects. In all cases of disturbance the senate and ^eat 
luerary men sided with the old exclusive views. The emperors 
as a rule mterfered for the benefit of the slave: and this helps 
us to understand the popularity of some even of the worst of their 
number. 

Juvenal, then, was not above his age, as Cicero and Seneca 
Iiacl beeiL He does protest against the cruel treatment of slaves 
by the Eoman ladies ; but he nowhere exerts his eloquence to 
adv^ocate their rights as men to protection and friendship. I^or 
does he enter a protest against the gladiatorial shows, which was 
the first thing a high moralist would have impugned, and which 
the Christians attacked with equal enthusiasm and couran-e We 
ooserve, however, with pleasure, that as Juvenal advanced in 
years his tone became gentler and purer, though his literary 
powers decayed. The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth Satires 
evince a kindly vein which we fail to find in the earlier ones, 
feome have fancied that in the interval he became acquainted with 
the teaching of Christianity. But this is a supposition as impro- 
bable as it is unsupported. 

On the style of Juvenal but little need be added. Its force, 
brevity, and concision have already been noticed, At the same 
time they do not seem to have been natural to him. Where he 
writes more easily he is diffuse and even verbose. The twelfth 
and Mteenth Satu^es are conspicuous examples of this. One is 
tempted to think that the fifteenth, had he written it twenty years 
earlier, would have been compressed into half its leno'th The 
diction IS classical; but like that of Tacitus, it is the Sassicality 
ot the Sliver Age. It shows, however, no diminution of power, and 
the gulf between it and that of Fronto and Apuleius in the next 
^f^^ iminense. Juvenal's language is based on a minute study 
ol Virgil;! his rhythm is based rather on that of Lucan, with 
whom m other respects he shows a great afhnitv. His verse is 
sonorous and powerful; he is fond of the break after the fourth 
loot. I hough monotonous, its weight makes it very impressive- 
It IS easily retamed in the memory, -and stands next to that of 
Vu'gil and Lucretius as a type of what the language can achieve. 

^.]w.f''T^^' allusions, and iniitatians of Virgil occur in most of the 



LIFE OF TACITUS. 449 

The resentment that goaded Juvenal to write satire seems 
also to have insj^ired the pen of C. Cornelius Tacitus. ^ He 
was born 54 a.d., oi, according to Arnold, 57 a.d., probably in 
liome. His father Avas perhaps the same who is alluded to by 
Pliny2 as procurator of Belgian Gaul. It is, at any rate, certain 
that the historian came of a noble and wealthy stock ; his habit 
of thought, prejudices, and tastes all reflect these of the highest 
and most exclusive society. He began the career of honours 
under Vespasian^ by obtaining his quaestorship, and, some years 
later, the aedileship. The dates of both these events are uncer- 
tain — another instance of the vagueness with which writers of 
this time allude to the circumstances of their own lives. We 
know that at tAvenfcy-one he married the daughter of Cn. Julius 
Agricola, and .that he was praetor ten years afterwards. He was 
also quindecimvir at the secular games under Domitian (88 a.d.). 
For some years he held a military command abroad, perhaps in 
Germany. On his return he was constant in his senatorial duties'^ 
and we find him joined with Pliny in the accusation of Marius 
Priscus, which was successful but unavailing. Under i^er\'a (97 
A.D.) he was made consul ; but soon retired from public life, and 
dedicated the rest of his days to literature, having sketched out a 
vast plan of Eoman history the greater part of which he lived to 
fulfd. The year of his death is uncertain. Erotier, followed by 
Arnold, thinks he was prematurely cut off before the close of 
Trajan's reign, but it is possible he lived somewhat longer, perhaps 
mitil 118 A.D. 

The first remark one naturally makes on reading the life of 
Tacitus, is that he was admirably fitted by his distinguished 
military and political career for the duties of a historian. Gibbon 
said that his year in the yeomanry had been of more service to 
him in describing battles than any closet study could have been ; 
and Tacitus has this great advantage over Livy that he had 
helped to make history as well as to relate it. His elevation to the 
rank of senator enabled him to understand the iniquity of Domi- 
tian's government in a way that would otherwise have been 
impossible ; and of the complicity shown by the servile fathers in 
their ruler's acts of crime, he speaks in the Agricola with some- 
thing like the shame of repentance. His character seems to have 
been naturally proud and independent, but unequal to heroism in 
action. Like almost all literary minds he shrunk from facing 
peril or discomfort, and tried to steer a course between the harsh 

^ His praenomen is uncertain ; some think it was Puhlius. 
■ N. H. vii. 17. 3 Hist. i. 1. ■* Agr. 45. 

2 F 



450 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

self-assertion of a Thrasea^ and the cringing servility of the 
majority of senators. This led him to become dissatisfied with 
himself, Avith the world, and with Divine Providence, ^ and has 
left a stamp of profound and rebellious melancholy on all his 
works. 

As a young man he had studied rhetoric under Aper Secundus,^ 
and perhaps Quintilian. He pleaded with th& greatest success, 
and Pliny gives it as his own highest ambition to be ranked next, 
he dare not say second, to Tacitus.* Nor was his deliberative 
eloquence inferior to his judicial. We learn, from Pliny again, 
that there was a pecuhar solemnity in his language, which gave 
to all he uttered the greatest weight. The panegyric he pro- 
nounced on Virginius Kufus, the man who twice refused the 
chance of empire, " the best citizen of his time," was celebrated 
as a model of that kind of oratory.^ 

The earhest work of his that has reached us is the Dialogus de 
caussis corruptae Eloquentiae, composed under Titus, or early 
under Domitian. It attributes the decay of eloquence to the 
decay of freedom ; but believes in a future development of im- 
perial oratory under the mild sway of just princes, founded not 
on feeble and repining imitation of the past, but on a just appreci- 
ation of the qualifications attainable in the present political con- 
ditions and state of the language. The argument is conducted 
throughout mth the greatest moderation, but the conclusion is 
decided in favour of the modern style, if kept within proper 
bounds. The time of the dialogue is laid in 75 a.d. ; the speakers 
are Curiatius Maternus, Aper Secundus, and Yipstanus Messala. 
The point of debate is one frequently discussed in the schools of 
rhetoric, and the work may be considered as a literary exercise ; 
but the author must have outgrown youth when he wrote it, and 
its ability is such as to give promise of commanding eminence in 
the future. The style is free and flowing, and full of imitations 
of Cicero. Tliis has caused some of the critics to attribute it to 
other authors, as Pliny the younger and Quintilian,^ who were 
known to be Ciceronianists. Put independently of the fact that it 
is distinctly above the level of these writers, we observe on look- 
ing closely many indications of Tacitus's pecuhar diction.'^ The 

^ A. iv. 20. 2 A. xiv. 12. » De Or. 2. 

* Ep. vii. 20, 4. 5 Ep. ii. l, 6. 

* Cli. 29 especially, seems an eclio of Quintilian. 

'' E.g. Pallentem Famam, eh. 13. The expression— Augustus eloquen- 
tiam sicut cetera pacavcrat ; and that so admirablj' paraphrased by Pitt 
(ch. 36), Magna eloquentia, sicut flamma, materia alitur et motibus excita- 
tui- et urendo clarescit. 



THE AGEICOLA. 451 

most striking personal notice occurs in tlie thirteenth chapter, 
where the author announces his determination to give up the life 
of ambition, and, like Yirgil, to be content with one of literary- 
retirement. This seems at first hard to reconcile with the known 
career of Tacitus ; but as the dialogue bears all the marks of early 
manhood, the resolve, though real, may have been a passing one 
only; or, in comparison with what he felt himself capable of 
doing, the activity actually displayed by him may have seemed 
as nothing, and to have merited the depreciatory notice he here 
bestows upon it. 

The work next in order of priority is the Agricola, a biography 
of his father-in-law, composed near the commencement of Trajan's 
reign, about 98 a. d. The talent of the author has now undergone a 
change; he is no longer the bright flowing spirit of th.e Dlalof/us, who 
acknowledged the decline while making the most of the excellences 
of his time ; he has become the stern, back-looking moralist, the 
burning panegyrist, whose very pictures of virtue are the most 
withering rebukes of vice. This treatise represents what Teuffel calls 
his Sallustian epoch; i.e., a phase or period of his mental devel- 
opment, in which his political and moral feeling, as well as his 
literary aspirations, led him to recall the manner of the great 
rhetorical biographer. The short preface, in which occurs a fierce 
protest against the wickedness of the time just past, reminds us of 
the more verbose but otherwise not dissimilar introduction to the 
Catiline: and the subordination of general history to the main 
subject of the composition is earned out in Sallust's way, but with 
even greater completeness. At the same time the Silver Age is 
betrayed by the extremely high colouring of the rhetoric, especi- 
ally in the last chapters, where an impassioned outpouring of 
aftection and despair seems by its prophetic eloquence to summon 
forth the genius that is to be. Already, in this work,i wc find 
that Tacitus has conceived the design of his Hldoriae, to which, 
therefore, the Agricola must be considered a preliminary study. 

As yet, Tacitus's manner is only half-formed. He must have 
acquired by painful labour that wonderful suggestive brevity which 
in the Annals reaches its culmination, and is of all styles the 
world of letters has ever seen, the most compressed and full of 
meaning. The Germania, however, in certain portions^ approxi- 
mates to it, and in other ways shows a. slight increase of maturity 
over the biography of Agricola. His object in ^vriting this trea- 
tise has been much contested. Some think it was in order to 
dissuade Trajan from a projected expedition that he painted the 

1 Ch. 3. 2 Esp. ch. 10. 11. 



452 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

German people as foes so f ormida'ble ; others that it is a satire on 
the vices of Eome couched under the guise of an innocent ethno- 
graphic treatise ; others that it is inspired by the genuine scientific 
desire to investigate the many objects of historic and natural 
interest with which a vast and almost unknown territory abounded. 
But none of these motives supplies a satisfactory explanation. 
The first can hardly be maintained owing to historical difficulties ; 
the second, though an object congenial to the Eoman mind, is not 
lofty enough to have moved the pen of Tacitus ; the third, though 
it may have had some weight with him, would argue a state of 
scientific curiosity in advance of Tacitus's position and age, and 
besides is incompatible with his culpable laziness in sifting infor- 
mation on matters of even still greater ethnographic interest.^ 

The true motive was no doubt his fear lest the continual assaults 
of these tribes should prove a permanent and insurmountable 
danger to Eome. Having in all probability been himself employed 
in Germany, Tacitus had seen with dismay of what stuff the nation 
was made, and had foreseen what the defeat of Varus might have 
remotely suggested, that some day the degenerate Eomans would 
be no match for these hardy and virtuous tribes. Thus, the 
design of the work was purely and pre-eminently patriotic ; nor is 
any other purpose worthy of tlie great historian, patrician, patriot, 
and soldier that he was. At the same time subsidiary motives are 
not excluded ; we may well believe that the gall of satire kindles 
his eloquence, and that the insatiable desire of knowledge stimu- 
lates his research while inquiring into the less accessible details of 
the German polity. The work is divided into two parts. The 
first gives an account of the situation, climate, soil, and inhabitants 
of the country ; it investigates the etymology of several German 
names of men and gods, describes the national customs, religion, 
laws, amusements, and especially celebrates the people's moral 
strictness ; but at the same time not without contrasting them un- 
favourably with Eome whenever the advantage is on her side. 
The second part contains a catalogue of the different tribes, with 
the geographical limits, salient characteristics, and a short his- 
torical account of each, whenever accessible. 

Next come the Histories, which are a narrative of the reigns of 
Galba, Otho, Yitellius, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian, written 
under Trajan. This work, of which we possess only four entire 
books, with part of the fifth, consisted originally of fourteen books, 
and was the most authentic and complete of all his wiitings. The 
loss of the last nine and a half books must be considered irrepar- 

^ Notably the history of the Je-v^'s. Hist. v. 



THE ANNALS. 453 

&b\e. In tlie Germania lie had shown the power of that h'bert}^ 
which the barbarians enjoj'-ed, had indicated their polity, in which 
even then the germs of feudalism, chivalry, the worship of the 
sex, troubadour minstrelsy, fahy mythology, and, above all, repre- 
sentative government, existed. In the Hlstoriae he paints with 
tremendous power the disorganisation of the Eoman state, the 
military anarchy which made the diadem the gift of a brutal 
soldiery, and revealed the startling truth that an emperor could be 
created elsewhere than at Eome. 

At this period his style still retains some traces of its former 
copious flow; it has not yet been pressed tight into the short 
scidentiae, which were its final and most characteristic develop- 
ment, and which in the Annals dominate to the exclusion of every 
other style. 

The Annals, ah excessu divi Augusti, in sixteen books, treated 
the history of the Empire until the extinction of the Claudian 
dynasty. They contain two separate threads of history, one internal, 
the other external. The latter is important and interesting ; bub 
the former is both in an immeasurably greater degree. It has 
been likened to a tragedy in two acts, the first terminating vdih. 
the death of Tiberius, the second with the death of I^ero. Tacitus 
in this work shows his personal sympathies more strongly than in 
any of the others. He appears as a Eoman of the old school, but 
still more, as an oligarchical partisan. ISTot that he indulged in 
chimerical plans for restoring the Eepublic. That he saw was im- 
possible; nor had he much sympathy with those who strove for 
it. But his resignation to the Empire as an unavoidable evil does 
not inspire him with contentment. His blood boils with indig- 
nation at the steady repression of the liberty of action of the old 
families, which the instincts of imperialism forced upon the 
monarchs from the very beginning ; nor do the general security 
of life and property, the battered condition of the provinces, and 
the long peace that had allowed the internal resources of the 
empire to be developed, make amends for what he considers the 
iniquitous tyranny practised upon the higher orders of the state. 
Thus he writes under a strong sense of injustice, which reaches 
its culmination in treating of the earlier reigns. But this does 
not provoke him into intemperate language, far less into misrepre- 
sentation of fact ; if he disdained to complain, he disdained still 
more to falsify. But he cannot help insinuating ; and his in- 
sinuations are of such searching power that, once suggested, they 
grasp hold of the mind, and will not be shaken off. Of all Latin 
authors none has so much power over the reader as Tacitus. If 
by eloquence is meant the ability to persuade, then he ifi the most 



454 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITEEATUEE. 

eloquent historian that ever existed. To douht his judgment is 
almost to be false to the conscience of history. ISTevertheless, his 
saturnine portraits have been severely criticised both by English 
and French historians, and the arguments for the defence put 
forward with enthusiasm as well as force. The result is, that 
Tacitus' s verdict has been shaken, but not reversed. The sur- 
passing vividness of such characters as his Tiberius and ISTero for- 
bids us to doubt their substantial reality. But once his prepos- 
sessions are known and discounted, the student of his works can 
give a freer attention to the countervailing facts, which Tacitus is 
too honourable to hide. 

After long wavering between the two styles, he adopted the 
brilliant one fashionable in his time, but he has glorified it in 
adopting it. Periods such as those of Pliny would be frigid in 
him. He still retains some traces (though they are few) of the 
rhetorician. In an interesting passage he complains of the com- 
parative poverty of his subject as contrasted with that of Livy : 
" Ingentia illi bella, expugnationes urbium, fuses captosque reges 
libero egressu memorabant; nobis in arcto et inglorius labor. 
Immota quippe aut modice lacessita pax maestae urbis res et 
princeps prof erendi imperii incuriosus ;'' ^ but he certainly had no 
cause to complain. The sombre annals of the Empire were not 
less amenable to a powerful dramatic treatment than the vigorous 
and aggressive youth of the Eepublic had been. Nor does the story 
of guilt and horror depicted in the Annals fall below even the 
finest scenes of Livy; in intensity of interest it rather exceeds them. 

Tacitus intended to have completed his labours by a history of 
Augustus's reign, which, however, he did not live to write. This 
is a great misfortune. But he has left us his opinion on the char- 
acter and policy of Augustus in the first few chapters of the 
Annals, and a very valuable opinion it is. What makes the his- 
torian more bitter in the Annals than elsewhere, is the feeling that 
it was the early emperors who inaugurated the evil policy which 
their successors could hardly help themselves in carrying out. 
When the failure of Piso's conspiracy destroyed the last hopes of 
the aristocracy, it was hardly possible to retain for the later 
emperors the same intense hatred that had been felt for those 
whose tyranny fostered, and then remorselessly crushed, the re- 
sistance of the patrician party. The Annals, therefore, though 
the most concentrated, powerful, and dramatic of Tacitus's works, 
hardly rank quite so high in a purely historical point of ^dow as 
the Histories ; as Merivale has said, tliey are all satire, 

1 Ann. iv. 32. 



GKANDEUR OF HIS GENIUS. 455 

At tlie same time, Hs facts are quite tnistwortliy. We know from 
Pliny's letters tliat he took gi-eat pains to get at the most authentic 
sources, and beyond doubt he was "vvell qualified to judge in cases 
of conflicting evidence. These diverse excellences, in the opiuion 
of Niebuhr and Arnold, place him indisputably at the head of the 
Boman historians. We cannot better close this account than in 
the eloquent words of a French writer : ^ " In Tacitus subjectivity 
predominates ; the anger and pity which in turn never cease to 
move him, give to his style an expressiveness, a rich glov/ of senti- 
ment, of which antiquity affords no other example. This constant 
imion between the cLramatic and pathetic elements, together with 
the directness, energy, and reality of the language, must act with 
irresistible force upon every reader. Tacitus is a poet ; but a poet 
that has a spirit of his own. Was he as fully appreciated in his 
own . day as he is in oin:s 1 We doubt it. The horrors, the 
degeneracy of his time, awake in his brooding soul the altogether 
modern idea of national expiation and national chastisement. 
The historian rises to the sublimity of the judge. He summons 
the guilty to his tribunal, and it is in the name of the Future and 
of Posterity that he pronounces the implacable and irreversible 
verdict." 

The poetical and Greek coi;structions with which Tacitus's style 
abounds^ the various artifices whereby he relieves the tedium of 
monotonous narrative, or attains brevity or variety, have been so 
often analysed in well-known grammatical treatises that it la 
unnecessary to do more than allude to them here, 

^ De Eury, Zes Femmes dc VEmjpire. 



CHAPTER YIIL 

The Beigns op Hadrian and the Antonines (117-180 a.d.). 

We now cater on a new and in some respects a very interesting 
era. Froni the influence exerted on the last period by the family 
of Seneca, we might call it the epoch of Spanish Latinity ; from 
the similar influence now exerted by the African school, we 
might call the present the epoch of African Latinity. Its chief 
characteristic is ill-digested erudition. Various circumstances 
combined to make a certain amount of knowledge general, and the 
groAnng cosmopolitan sentiment eii:cited a strong interest in every 
kind of exotic learning. With increased diffusion depth was 
necessarily sacrificed. The emperor set the example of travel, 
which was eagerly followed by his subjects. Hence a large mass 
of information was acquired, which injuriously affected those who 
possessed it. They appear, as it were, crushed by its weight, 
and become learned triflers or uninteresting pedants. Ey far the 
most considerable writer of this period was Suetonius, but then he 
had been trained in the school of Pliny, of whom for several years 
he was an intimate friend. Hadrian himself (76-138 a.d.), among 
his many other accomplishments, gave some attention to letters. 
Speeches, treatises of various kinds, anecdotes, and a collection of 
oracles, are ascribed to his pen. Also certain epigrams which we 
still possess, and chiefly that exquisite address to his soul, com- 
posed on his death-bed : ^ 

Animula vagnla blandiila 

Hospes comesque corporis 

Quae nunc abibis in loca, 

Pallidula rigida nudula ? 

Nee ut soles dabis iocos." 

Hadrian was also a patron of letters, though an inconstant one. 
His vanity led him to wish to have distinguished writers about 
him, but it also led him to wish to be ranked as himself the most 
distin^piished. His own taste was good ; he appreciated and 

1 For an excellent account of this inconstant prince see his biography by 
Aelius Spartianus, who preserves other poems of his. 



LITE OF SUETONIUS. 457 

copied the style of tlie republican age; but be encouraged the 
pedantic Fronto, whose taste was corrupt and ruinously influential. 
So that while with one hand he benefited hterature, with the 
other he injured it. 

The birth year of C. Suetonius Tranquillus is uncertain, but 
may be assigned with probability to 75 a.d.^ We may here 
remark the extraordinary reticence of the later writers on the 
subject of their younger days. Seneca alone is communicative. 
All tho rest show an oblivion or indifference most unlike the 
genial communicativeness of Cicero, Horace, and Ovid. His 
father vras one Suetonius Lenis, a military tribune and wearer of 
the angusticlave. Muretus, however, desirous to give him a more 
illustrious origin, declares that his father was the Suetonius Pau- 
linus mentioned by Tacitus. We learn a good deal of liis younger 
days from the letters of Phny, and can infer something of his 
character also. In conformity with what we know from other 
sources of the tendencies of the age, we find that he was given 
to superstition. 2 At this time (z.e. under Trajan) Suetonius 
wav(!red between a literary and a political career. Pliny was 
able and willing to help him in the latter, and got him appointed 
to the office of tribune (102 a.d.).^ Some years later (112 a.d.), 
he procured for him the jus trium lihi-rorum, though Suetonius 
was childless. We see that Augustus's excellent institutions had 
already turned into an abuse. The means for keeping up the 
population had become a compensation for domestic unhappiness.* 
Suetonius practised for some years at the bar, and seems to have 
amassed a considerable fortune. We find him begging Pliu}^ to 
negotiate for him for the purchase of an estate.^ Shortly after 
this he was promoted to be Hadrian's secretary, which gave him 
an excellent opportunity of enriching his stores of knowledge from 
the imperial library. Of this opportunity he made excellent use, 
and after his disgrace, owing, it is said, to too great familiarity with 
the .empress (119 a.d.), he devoted his entire time to those multi- 
farious and learned works, which gave him the position of the 
Varro of the imperial period. His hfe was prolonged for many 
years, probably until 160 a.d.^ 

The writings of Suetonius were encyclopaedic. Following tlie 
culture of his day, he seems to have written partly in Greek, partly 
in Latin. This had been also the practice of Cicero, and of n^any 

1 Cf. Dom. 12, Interfuisse me adolcscentulum niemini cum inspioprctur 
senex (a Domitiano). From Gram. 4, Ner. 57, as compared with this, we 
should infer that he was about fifteen in the year 90. 

^ E:p. i. 18. 3 Ep. iii. 8. * Paneg. Traj. 95. 5 j^p j 24. 

** E.g. Fronto writing under Antoninus mentions him as still livinix. 



458 HISTOKY OF KOMAN LITEKATUllE. 

of the greatest republican authors. The difference hetween them 
lies, not in the fact that Suetonius's Greek was better, but that his 
Latin is less good. Instead of a national it is fast becoming a 
sosmopohtan dialect. Still Suetonius tried to form his taste on 
older and purer models, and is far removed from the denationalised 
school of Pronto and Apuleius. 

The titles of his works are a little obscure. Roth, following 
Suidas, gives the following. (1) irepl twv Trap' ^EXXtjo-l TratStcov 
jSi^Xtov, a book of games. This is quoted or paraphrased by 
TzetzeSji and several excerpts from it are preserved in Eustathius. 
It was no doubt written in Greek, but perhaps in Latin also. (2) 
TTfpl TOJi/ Trapa 'Pto/xatoi? ^ewptcov kol ayu)V(i)V (iifBXia y, an account 
in three books of the Eoman spectacles and games, of which an 
interesting fragment on the Troia Indus is preserved by Tertullian.^ 
(3) irepi rov Kara 'Pw/xatoi;? iviavTov /3l/3Xlov, an archceological 
investigation into the theory of the Eoman year. (4) Trept rwv 
iv Tots /SiPXiois (rr]fX€LO)v, on the signification of rare words. (5) 
■jrepl TTJ? KtKepwvo5 TroXtreia?, a justification of the conduct of 
Cicero, in opposition to some of his now numerous detractors, 
especially one Didymus, a conceited Alexandrine, called Chalcen- 
terus, " the man of u'on digestion," on account of his immense 
powers of work. (6) Trept orop.arcov kol iSea? IcrOrjixaTiDV kol vtto- 
S-qfidroiv, a treatise on the different names of shoes, coats, and other 
articles of dress. This may seem a trivial subject ; but, after 
Carlyle, we can hardly deny its capability of throwing light on great 
matters. Besides, in ancient times dress had a religious origin, and 
in many cases a religioiis significance. And two passages from 
the work preserved by Servius,^ are important from this jDoint of 
view. (7) TTcpi Sv(Tcf>-)]iJLOiv Xi^ewv rjroL /SXaacfirjfxMv, an inquiry 
into the origin and etjrmology of the various terms of abuse 
employed in conversation and literature. This was almost cer- 
tainly written in Greek. (8) Trepi 'Pco/xT^g koL tojv iv avrfj vo/jLifxatv 
KOL r}Ou)v fSt^Xio. yS, a succinct account of the chief Eoman customs, 
of which only a short passage on the Triumph has come down to 
us through Isidore.* (9) '^vyyeviKov Kaicrdpwv,^ a biography of 
the twelve Caesars, divided into eight books. (10) Srep-p-a 
"PoifjiaLwv dvBpuJv iina-ijfxwv, a gaUery of illustrious men, the 

^ Hist. Var. 6, 874-886 (Roth). 2 De Spect. 5. 

^ Ad Ae7i. 7, 612: Tria siintgeneratrabearum; nnuni diis sacratum, quod 
est tant\irn de pur2')ura; aliiid regnm, quod est purpureum, habet tanem 
album aliquid; tertium augurale de purpura et cocco. The other passage 
(Ad Aen. 2, 683) describes the different priestly caps, the apex^ the tutuliLS, 
and the galerus. 

* Etym. 18, 2, 3. 

^ Perhaps the word ^re/xfia should be supplied before avyyiviKov. 



LIST OF SUETOXIUS'S WORKS. 459 

plan of which, was followed by Jerome in Ms history of the 
vvorthies of the church. But Suetonius's catalogue seems to 
have been confined to those eminent in literature, and to have 
treated only of poets, orators, historians, philosopliers, gram- 
marians, and rhetoricians. Of this we possess considerable frag- 
ments, especially the account of the grammarians, and the 
lives of Terence, Horace, and Pliny. (11) irepl iTna^fxwv Tropvcov, 
an account of those courtesans who had become renowned through 
theii* wit, beauty, or genius. (12) De V/'tiis Coriwralihus, a list of 
bodily defects, Avritten perhaps to supplement the medical works 
of Celsus and Scribonius Largus. (13) De Institutione Offici- 
ontm, a manual of rank as fixed by law, and of social and court 
etiquette. This, did we possess it, would be highly interesting, 
and might throw light on many now obscure points. (14) Ve 
Beglhus, in three books, containing short biographies of the most 
renowned monarchs in each of the three divisions of the globe, 
treated in his usual style of a string of facts coupled w^ith a list 
of virtues and vices. (15) De Rebus Variis^ a sort of cma, of 
which we can detect but few, and those insignificant, notices. 
(16) Pruta, or miscellaneous subjects, in ten or perhaps twelve 
books, which work was greatly admired not only in the centuries 
immediately succeeding, but also throughout the Middle Ages. 
It is extremely probable, as Teuffel thinks, that many of the fore- 
going treatises may really have been simply portions of the Praia 
cited under their separate names. The first eight books were 
confined to national antiquities and other similar points of interest ; 
the rest were given to natural science and that sort of popular 
philosophy so much in vogue at the time, which finds a parallel 
between every fact of the physical universe and some phenomenon 
of tha human body or mmd. They were modelled on Yarro's 
waitings, which to a large extent they superseded, except for great 
"Writers like Augustine, who went back to the fountain head.i 
It is uncertain whether Suetonius treated history ; but a work on 
the wars between Pompey and Caesar, Antony and Octavian, is 
indicated by some notices in Dio Cassius and Jerome, All these 
writings, however, are lost, and the sole work by which we can 
form an estimate of Suetonius's genius is his lives of the Caesars, 
which we fortunately possess almost entire. 

Suetonius possessed in a high degree some of the most essential 
qualifications of a biographer. He was minute, laborious, and 

^ In one MS. is appended to Suetonius's works a list of grammatical obser- 
vations called Differentiae scrmonuvi Remmi Pnlaemonis ex lihro Snctoni 
Tranqxiilli qui inscribitur Fratum. Roth prints these, Lut does not believe 
them genuine. 



460 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

accurate in his investigation of facts ; lie neglected nothing, how- 
ever trivial or even offensive, which he thought threw light upon 
the character or circumstances of those he descrihed. And he is 
completely impartial; it would perhaps he more correct to say 
indifferent. His accounts have been well compared by a French 
writer to the proces verbal of the law courts. They are dry, 
systematic, and uncoloured by partisanship or passion. Such 
statements are valuable in themselves, and particularly when read 
as a pendant to the history of Tacitus, which they often confirm, 
often correct, and ahvays illustrate. To take a single point ; we 
see from Tacitus how it was that the emperors were so odious to 
the aristocracy: we see from Suetonius how it was that they 
became the idols of the people. Many of the details are extremely 
disgusting, but this strong realism is a Eoman characteristic, and 
adds to their value. To the higher attributes of a historian 
Suetonius has no pretension. He scarcely touches on the great 
historic events, and never ventures a comprehensive judgment j 
nor can he even take a wide survey of the characters he pourtrays. 
Eut he is a faithful collector of evidence on which the philosopbic 
biographer may base his own judgment ; and as he generally gives 
his sources, which are authentic in almost every case, we may use 
his statements with perfect confidence. 

His style is coloured with rhetoric, and occasionally with poetic 
embellishment, but is otherwise terse and vigorous. The extreme 
curtness he cultivated often leads him into something bordering 
on obscurity. His habit of alluding to sources of information 
instead of being at the pains to describe them at length, while it 
adds to the neatness of his periods, detracts from its value to our- 
selves. He rises but rarely into eloquence, and still more rarely 
shows dramatic power. The best known of his descriptive scenes 
is the death of Julius Caesar, but that of N"ero is almost more 
graphic. It may interest the reader to give a translation of it.^ 
The scene is the palace, the time, the night before his death : — 

*' He thus put off deciding what to do till next day. But ahout midnight 
he awoke, and finding the guard gone, leapt out of bed, and sent round 
messages to his friends ; but meeting with no response, he himself, accom- 
panied by one or two persons, called at their houses in turn. But every 
door was shut, and no one answered his inquiries, so he returned to his 
chamber to find the guard had fled, carrying with them the entire furniture, 
and with the rest his box of poison. He at once asked for Spiculus the 
niirmillo or some other trained assassin to deal the fatal blow, but could get 
no one. This seemed to strike him ; lie cried out, ' Have I then neither 
friend nor enemy ? ' and ran forward as if intending to throw himself into the 

' It will be found Ner. 47-49. 



THE LIVES OF THE CAESARS. 461 

river. Bnt cTieckinof his stejis he begged for some better concealed hiding- 
place where he might have lime to collect his thoughts. The freedman 
Phaou oiiered his suburban villa, sityate four miles distant, midway between 
the Salarian and Nomentane roads ; so just as he was, bare-foot and clad in 
his tunic, he threw lound him a faded cloak, and covering his head, and 
binding a napkin over his face, mounted a horse with four companions of 
whom Sporus was one. On starting he was terrified by a shock of earth- 
quake and an adverse flash of lightning, and heard from the camp hard by 
the shouts of the soldiers predicting his ruin and Galba's triumph. A tra- 
veller, as they passed, observed, ' Those men are pursuing Nero ; ' another 
asked, ' Is there any news in town about JSTero ? ' His horse took fright at 
the smell of a dead body which had been thrown into the road ; in the con- 
fusion his disguise fell off, and a praetorian soldier recognised and saluted 
him. Arrived at the post-house, they left their horses, and struggled 
through a thorny copse by following a track in the sandy soil, but were 
obliged to put cloths under their feet as they walked. However, they 
arrived safely at the back wall of the villa. Phaon then suggested that they 
should hide in a cavern hard by, formed by a heap of sand. But l^ero 
declaring that he would not be buried alive, they waited a little, till a chance 
should offer of entering the villa unobserved. Seeing some water in a little 
pool, he scooped some up with his hand, and just before drinking said ' This 
is Nero's distilled water!' then, seeing how his cloak was torn by the 
brambles, he peeled off the thorns from the branches that crossed the path. 
Then crawling on all fours, he passed through a narrow passage out of the 
cavern into the nearest cellar, and there laid himself on a pallet made of old 
straw and furnished with anything but a comfortable pillow. Becoming 
both hungry and thirsty, he refused some musty bread that was offered him, 
but drank a little tepid water. To free himself from the constant shower of 
abuse that those who came to gaze poured on him, he ordered a pit to be 
made according to the measure of his body, and any bits of marble that lay 
by to be heaped together, and water and wood to be brought for the proper 
disposing of the corpse ; weeping at each stage of the proceedings, and saying 
every now and then, * Oh ! what an artist the world is losing ! " ^ 

While thus occupied a missive was brought to Phaon. Nero snatched it 
out of his hand, and read that he had been decreed an enemy by the senate, 
and was demanded for punishment ' according to the manner of our ancestors.' 
He asked what this meant. Being told that he would be stripped naked, 
his neck fixed in a pitchfork, and his back scourged until he was dead, he 
seized in his terror two daggers which he had brought with him, but after 
feeling their edge put them back into their sheaths, alleging that the fated 
hour had not yet come. Sometimes he would ask Sporus to raise the funeral 
lamentation, then he would implore some one to set him an example of 
courage by dying first ; sometimes he would chide his own irresoluteness by 
saying — ' I am a base degenerate man to live ! This does not beseem Nero ! 
We must be steady on occasions like these — come, rouse yourself ! ' ^ Already 
the horsemen were seen approaching Avho had received orders to carry him 
off alive. Crying out in the words of Homer : 

' The noise of swift-footed steeds strikes my ears,' 
he drove the weapon into his throat with the help of his secretary Epaphro- 
ditus, and immediately fell back half-dead. The centurion now arrived, and, 
under the pretence of assisting him, x>ut his cloak to the wound ; Nero only 

^ Qualis artifex pereo. 

- ilany of these (-jnculations arc in Greek. On this see note i. p. 37. 



462 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

replied, ' Too late !' and * This is your loyalty !' With these words he died, 
his eyes being quite glazed, and starting out in a manner horrible to witness. 
His continual and earnest petition had been that no one should have posses- 
sion of his head, but that come what would, he might be buried whole. 
This Talus, Galba's freedman, granted." 

It will be seen tliat liis narrative, though not lofty, is masterly, 
clear, and impressive. 

Besides Suetonius we have a historian, though a minor one, in 
P. Annius Florus,! who is now generally identified with the 
rhetorician and poet mentioned more than once by Pliny, and 
author of a dialogue, " Vergilius Orator an Poet a,'" and some lines 
De Rods and De Qualitate Vltae.^ Little is known of his life, except 
that he was a youth in the time of Domitian, was vanquished at 
the Capitoline contest through ungust partiality, and settled at 
Tarraco as a professional rhetorician. Under Hadrian he returned 
to Eome, and probably did not survive his reign. The epitome 
of Livy's history, or rather the wars of it, from the foundation of 
Eome to the era of Augustus, in two short books, is a pretentious 
and smartly written work. But it shows no independent investiga- 
tion, and no power of impartial judgment. Its views of the con- 
stitution ^ are even more superficial than those of Livy. The first 
book ends with the Gracchi, after whom, according to the author, 
the decline began. The frequent moral declamations were greatly 
to the taste of the Middle Ages, and throughout them Plorus was 
a favourite. Abridgments were now the fashion; perhaps that of 
Pompeius Trogus by Justinus belongs to this reign.* Many his- 
torians wrote in Greek. 

Jurisprudence was also actively cultivated. "We have the two 
great names of Salvius Julianus and Sex. Pomponixjs, both of 
whom continued to write under the Antonines. They were nearly 
of an age. Pomponius, we infer from his own' words, ^ was born 
somewhere about 84 a.d., and as he lived to a great age, it is pro- 
bable that he survived his brother jurist. Both enjoyed for several 
centuries a high and deserved reputation. The rise of philoso- 
phical jurispiudence coincides with the decline of all other litera- 
ture. It must be considered to belong to science rather than 
letters, and is far too wide a subject to be more than merely 
noticed here. Both these authors wrote a digest, as well as 
numerous othsr works. The best-known popular treatise of Pom- 
ponius was his Enchiridion, or Manual of the Law of Nations, 

i Usually (from the Cod. Bamberg.) J uhus Florus ; but Mommsen considers 
this a corriiptioii. 

2 Riese, Antliol. Lat. p. 168-70 ; lb. No. 87, p. 101. Some have ascribed 
the Pci vigilium Veneris lo him. 

Mi. 1. ^ See back page 331. ^ Dig. xl. 5, 20, 



FRONTO. 463 

containing a slietch of the liistory of Eoman law and jurisprudence 
until the time of Juhan.^ 

The study "of grammar and rhetoric was pursued with much 
industry, but by persons of inferior mark. Antonius Julianus, 
a Spaniard, some account of whom is given by Gellius,^ kept up 
the older style as against the new African fashion. His declama- 
tions have perished; but those of Calpurnius Flaccus still 
remain. The chief rhetoricians seem to have confined themselves 
to declaiming in Greek. The celebrated Favorinus, at once philo- 
sopher, rhetorician, and minute grammarian, was one of the most 
popular. Terentius Scaurus wrote a book on Latin grammar, 
and commentaries on Plautus and VirgiL We have his treatise 
De Ortliograplda, which contains many rare ancient forms. His 
evident desire to be brief has caused some obscurity. The author 
formed his language on the older models ; like Suetonius, follow- 
ing Phny, and through him, the classical period. 

Philosophers abounded in this age, and one at least, Plutarch, 
has attained the highest renown. As he, in common with all 
the rest, wrote in Greek, no more will be said about them here. 

A medical writer of some note, whose two works on acute (celeres 
passiones) and chronic (tardae) diseases have reached us, is Caelius 
AuRELiANUs. His cxact date is not kno^vn. But as he never 
alludes to Galen, it is probable he lived before him. He was born 
at Sicca in Numidia, and chiell}' followed Soranus. 

The reigns of Antoninus Pius and his bon, the saintly M. 
Aurelius, covered a space of forty-two years, during which good 
government and consistent patronage did all they could for letters. 
Eut though the emperor could give the tone to such literature as 
existed, he could not revive the old force and spirit, which were 
gone for ever. The Eomans now showed aU the signs of a decay- 
ing ppopl-,}. The loss of serious interest in anything, even in 
pleasure, argues a reduced mental calibre ; and the substitution of 
minute learning for original thought always marks an irrecover- 
able decadence. The chief writer during the earlier part of this 
period is M. Cornelius Fronto (90-168 a.d.), a native of Cirta, 
in Namidia, who had been held under Hadrian to be the first 
pleader of the day ; and now rose to even greater influence from 
being intrusted with the education of the two young Caosars, M. 
Aurelius and L. Verus. Fronto suffered acutely from the gout, 
and the tender solicitude displayed by Aurelius for his preceptor's 
ailments is pleasant to see, though the tone of condolence is some- 
times a little mawkish. Fronto was a thorough pedant, and of 

^ For these writers, see TeufT". § 345. ' '. J, 1. 



464 HISTOliY OF llOMAN LITERATUKE. 

corrupt taste. He liad all the clumsy . affectation of Ms school. 
Aurelius adopted his teacher's love of archaisms with such zest 
that even Pronto was obliged to advise a more popular style. 
"When Aurelius left off rhetoric for the serious study of philosophy, 
Fronto tried his best to dissuade him from such apostasy. In his 
eyes eloquence, as he understood it, was the only pursuit worthy 
of a great man. In later life Aurelius arrived at better canons of 
judgment ; in his Meditations he praises Fronto's goodness,^ but 
says not a word about his eloquence. His contemporaries were 
less reserved. They extolled him to the skies, and made him 
their oracle of all wisdom. Eumenius ^ says, " he is the second 
and equal glory of Eoman eloquence;" and Macrobius^ says, 
" There are four styles of speech; the copious, of which Cicero is 
chief; the terse, in which Sallust holds sway; the dry,^ which is 
assigned to Fronto; the florid, in which Pliny luxuriates." With 
testimonies like these before them, and the knowledge that he 
had been raised to the consulship (143) and to the confidential 
friendship of two emperors, scholars had formed a high estimate 
of his genius. Eut the discovery of his letters by Mai (1815) 
undeceived them. Independently of their false taste, which can- 
not fail to strike the reader, they show a feeble mind, together 
with a lack of independence and self-reliance. He has, however, 
a good naturel, and a genial self-conceit, which attracts us to him, 
and we are not surprised at the affection of his pupil, though we 
suspect it has led him to exaggerate his master's influence. 

Until these came to light, scarcely anything was known of 
Fronto's works. Five discussions on the signification of words 
had been preserved in Gellius, and a passage in which he violently 
attacks the Christians in Minucius Felix. But the letters give an ex- 
cellent idea of his mind, i.e. they are well stocked with words, and 
supply as little as possible of solid information. Family matters, 
mutual condolences, pieces of advice, interspersed with discussions 
on eloquence, form their staple. The collection consisted of ten 
books, five written to Aurelius as heir-apparent, and five to him 
as emperor. But Ave have lost the greater part of the latter series; 
Of Fronto's numerous other writings only scattered fragments re- 
main. They are as follows : — (1) Panegyric speeches addressed to 
Hadrian^ and Antonmus (among which was the celebrated one on his 

^ He speaks of having learnt from him Th iTria-raadai on t) rvpavviK^ 
fiacTKavla Koi iroiKiXia koX vitoKpKTis KoX on «s iiriTrav oi KaAovfievoi ovrot, tto^ 
rjfiiu EvirarpiSai acTopyoTepol irdos elaiv. 

2 Paueg. Constant. 14. ^ Sat. v. 1. 

* Siccum. This shows more acumen than we should have expected from 
Macrobius. 

5 Ep. ad M. Caes ii. 1. 



AULUS GELLIUS. 465 

Britisli victories 140 a.d.). (2) A speecTi returnrng thanks to the 
senate 'on behalf of the Carthaginians. (3) Speeches for the 
liiuhynians and Ptolomaeenses. (4) Speeches foY and against indi- 
viduals. (5) The speech against the Christians quoted by Minu- 
cius. (6) Appended to the letters are also some Greek epistles 
to members of the imperial household, a consolation from Aure- 
lius to Fronto on the death of his grandson, and his reply, Avhich 
ii^ a mixture of desponding pessimism and philological pedantry.^ 
(7) Trifles like the epcortKos, a study based on Plato's theory of 
love, the story of Arion, the feriae aUienses, in which he humor- 
oxiflj advises the prince to take a holiday, the laudes fami et 
piilven's, a rhetorical exercise,^ show that he was quite at home . 
in a less ambitious vein. 

The best example of his style and habits of thought is found 
in tb3 letters De Eloquent ia on p. 139 sqq. of l^aber's edition. 

His life was soured by suffering and bereavement. His wife and 
all his children but one died before him, and he himself was a 
victim to various diseases. His interest for us is due to his rela- 
tions ^dth Aurelius and the general dearth at that period of first- 
rate writers. He died probably before the year 169. With 
!Fronto's letters are found a considerable number of those of Aure- 
lius, but they do not call for any remark. The writings that have 
brought him the purest and loftiest fame are not in Latin but in 
Greek. It would therefore be out of place to dwell on them here. 

A youngBr contemporary and admirer of Fronto is Aulus 
Gellius (1251-175 a.d.), author of the Nodes Atticae, in twenty 
books, a pleasant, gossiping work, written to occupy the leisure of 
his sons, and containing a vast amount of interesting details on 
literature and religious or antiquarian lore. Gellius is a man of 
small mind, but makes up by zeal for lack of power. He was 
trained in philosophy under Favorinus, in rhetoric under Antonius 
Julianus and, perhaps, Fronto, but his style and taste are, on the 
whole, purer than those of his preceptors. The title Nodes 
Atticae was chosen, primarily, because the book was written at 
Athens and during the lucubrations of the night ; but its modestry 
was also a recommendation in hie eyes. The subjects are very 
various, but grammar or topics connected with it preponderate. 
A large space is devoted to anecdotes, literary and historical, and 
among these are found both the most interesting and the best 
written passages. Another element of importance is found in the 
quotations, which are very numerous, from ancient authors. The 

^ In complaining of fate, he suddenly breaks off with tlie ^\ords : Fata 
afnvdo appdhda ainnt; hcccine est red ef aril § 7. 
2 Ou this see a fuller account, pp. 473, 474. 



466 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

reader will appreciate the value of these from the corxtinnal 
references to Gellius which have been made in this work.^ 

The style of GeUius abounds with archaisms and rare words, 
e.g., edidcare, recentari., aeruscator, adulcscentes frugis, elegans ver- 
horum, and shows an unnecessary predilection for frequentatives.^ 
It is obvious that in his day men had ceased to feel the full mean- 
ing of the words they used. As a depraved bodily condition 
requires larger and stronger doses of physic to affect it, so Gellius, 
when his subject is most trivial, strives most for overcharged 
vigour of language.^ But these defects are less conspicuous in the 
later books, where his thought also rises not unfrequently into a 
higher region. The man's nature is amiable and social; he 
enlisted the help of his friends in the preparation of his little 
essa3'"s,* and seems to have been on kindly terms with most of the 
chief -writers of the day. Among the ancients his admiration was 
chiefly bestowed on Yirgil and Cicero as representatives of litera- 
ture, on Varro and Nigidius Figulus,^ as representatives of science. 
His power of criticism is narrowed by pedantry and small passions, 
but when these are absent he can use his judgment well.^ He 
preserves many interesting points of etymology'' and grammar,^ 
and is a mine of archaic quotation. Among contemporary philo- 
sophers he admires most Plutarch, Favorinus, and Herodes Atticus 
the rival of Fronto. He smiles at the enthusiasm with which 
some regard all that is obsolete, and mentions the Ennianistae^ 
with half-disapproval. But his own bias inclines the same way, 
only he brings more taste to it than they. On the whole he is a 
very interesting writer, and the last that can be called in any way 
classical. He is well spoken of by Augustine ;^^ and Macrobius, 
though he scarcely mentions him, pillages his works without 
reserve. His eighth book is lost, but the table of contents is 
fortunately preserved. 

A great genius belonging to this time is the jurist Gaius (110- 
180 A.D.). His nomen is not known; whence some have sup- 

^ Some of the more interesting chapters in his work may be referred to : — 
On religion, i. 7 ; iv. 9 ; iv. 11 ; v. 12; vi. 1. On law, iv. 3 ; iv. 4 ; iv. 5; 
T. 19 ; vii. 15 ; x. 20. On Virgil, i. 23 ; ii. 3 ; ii. 4 ; v. 8 ; vi. 6 ; vii. 12; 
vii. 20 ; ix. 9 ; x. 16 ; xiii. 1 ; xiii. 20. On Sallust, i. 15; ii. 27; iii. 1 ; 
iv. i5 ; x. 20. On Ennius, iv. 7 ; vii. 2 ; xi. 4; xviii. 5. 

2 And those often rare ones, as soliiavisse. 

' E.g. in vii. 17, where he poses a grammarian as to the signification of 
6b)wrins. Compare also xiv. 5, on the vocative of egregius. 

■* See xiv. 6. ^ See iv. 9. 

• See esp. xix. 9. ^ E.g. iv. 1. 

8 Especially iv. 17 ; v. 21 ; vii. 7, 9, 11 ; xvi. 14 ; xviii. 8, 9. 

' xviii. 6. ^^ Civ. Dei. ix. 4. 



GAIUS. 467 

posed that lie never came to Eome. But this is both extremely 
unlikely in itself, and contradicted by at least one passage of his 
■works. He was a professor of jurisprudence for many years, and 
from the style of his extant works Teuffel conjectures that they 
originated from oral lectures. It is astonishing how clear even 
the later Latin language -becomes when it touches on congenial 
subjects, such as agriculture or law. The ancient legal phraseology 
had been seriously complained of as being so teclniical as to baflie 
all but experts in deciphering its meaning. Horace ridicules tiie 
cunning of the trained legal intellect in more than one place. 
But this reproach was no longer just. The series of able and 
thoughtful writers who had carried out a successive and systematic 
treatment of law since the Augustan age had brought into it such 
matchless clearness, that they have formed the model for all sub- 
sequent philosophic jurists. The amalgamation of the great Stoic 
principles of natural right, the equality of man, and the jus 
gentium, which last was gradually expanding into the conception 
of international law, contributed to make jurisprudence a complete 
exponent of the essential character of the Empire as the " polity 
of the human race." The works of Gains included seven books 
Rerum Cotidianarum, which, like the work of Apuleius, were styled 
Aurei; and an introduction to the science of law, called Institu- 
tlones, or Instituta, in four books. These were published 161 a. n., 
and at once established themselves as the most popular e5:position 
of the subject. Gains was a native of the east, but of wJiat 
country is uncertain. The names of several other jurists are 
preserved. They were divided into two classes,^ the practicians, 
who pleaded or responded, and the regularly endowed professors 
of jurisprudence. Of the former class Sex. Julius Africanus 
was the most celebrated for his acute intellect and the extreme 
difficulty of his definitions ; Ulpius Marceillus for his deep learn- 
ing and the prudence of his decisions. He was an adviser of the 
emperor Aurelius. A third writer, one of whose treatises — that 
on the divisions of money, weights, and measures, — is still extr^nt, 
was L. VoLusius Maecianus. The reader is referred for informa 
tion on this subject to TeufFel's work, and Pos4;e's edition of the 
Institutes of Gaius. 

Among minor authors we may mention C. Sulpioius Apolli 
NARis, a Carthaginian, who became a teacher of rhetoric and 
grammar, and numbered among his pupils Aulus Gellius. He 
and Arruntius Celsus devoted their talents for the most part to 
subjects of archaic interest. Erudition of a certain kind had now 



468 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

"become nniversal, and was disciissecf with ail the formality and 
exuberance of public debate. The disputations of the mediaeval 
universities seem to have found their germ in these animated 
discussions on trivial subjects, such as are described in chapters of 
Gellius to which the reader has already been referred.^ 

Historical research flagged ; epitomizers had possession of the 
field. We have the names of L. Ampelius, the author of an 
abridged "book of useful information on various subjects," history 
predominating, called Liber Memorialis, which still remains ; and 
of Granius Licinianus, short fragments of whose Eoman history 
in forty books are left to us. 

Poetry Avas even more meagrely represented. Aulus Gellius" 
has preserved a translation of one of Plato's epigrams, which he 
calls ovK aixovao<;, by a contemporary author, whose name he does 
not give. It is written in dimeter iambics, an easier measure than 
the hexameter, and therefore more within the reduced capacity of 
the time. The loose metrical treatment proceeds not so much from 
ignorance of the laws of quantity as from imitation of Hadrian's 
lax style,^ and perhaps from a tendency, now no longer possible 
to resist, to adopt the plebeian methods of speech and rhythm into 
the domain of recognised literature. As the fragment may interest 
GUI readers, we quote it : 

** Dnm semihiulco savio 
Meum puellum -savior, 
Dulcemque floreni spiritus 
Duco ex apevto tram it e ; 
Auimula aegra et saucia 
Cucnrrit ad labias niihi, 
Eictunique in oris perviam 
Et labra pueri mollia, 
Eiraata itineri trajisitus 
Ut transihret, nititur. 
Turn si morae quid phiscula© 
Fuisset in coetu osculi 
Amoris igni percita 
Transisset, et me Hnqueret : 
Et niira prorsum res foret, 
Ut ad me fierem mortuus, 
Ad puerum intus viverem." 

In the fifth and last lines we see a reversion to the ante-classical 

irregularities of scansion. The reader should refer to the remarks 
on this subject on page 20. 

Perhaps the much-disputed poem called Pervigilium Veneris 

1 I^ote 1, p. 466. 2 xix. 11. 

^ The personal taste of the emperors now grently helped to form styla. 
This sliould not be forgotten in criticising the works of this period. 



APULEIUS. 4G9 

belongs to this epouh.^ It is printed in "Weber's Corjnis Foetarum,^ 
and is well worth reading from the melancholy despondency that 
breathes through its quiet inspiration. The metre is the trochaic 
tetrameter, which is always well suited to the Latin language, aixd 
which here appears treated with Greek strictness, except that in 
lines 55, 62, 91, a spondee is used in the fifth foot instead of a 
trochee. The refrain — 

** Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit, eras amet," 

may be called the " last word " of expiring epicureanism. 

The last writer that comes before us is the rhetorician and 
pseudo-philosopher, L. Apuleius. He was born at Madaura, in 
Africa, 114 a.d.^ and calls himseK Seminumida et Semigaetula.* 
His parents were in easy circumstances, and sent him to school at 
Carthage, which was fast rising to the highest place among the 
seminaries of rhetoric. Ey his father's death he came into a con- 
siderable fortune, and in order to finish his education spent some 
time at Athens, and travelled through many parts of the East hunting 
up all the information he could find on magic and necromancy, 
and getting himself initiated into all the different mysteries. 
About 136 he came to Eome, where he practised at the bar for 
about two years. He then returned to Madaura; but soon 
growing discontented determined to indulge his restless craving for 
travel and acquiring knowledge. He therefore set out for Egypt, 
the nurse of all occult wisdom, and the centre of attraction for all 
carious spirits. On his way he fell ill and was detained at Oea, 
where he met a rich widow named Pudentilla,.whom in course of 
time he married. Her two sons had not been averse to the match, 
indeed Apuleius says they strongly urged it forward. But very 
soon they found their step-father an inconvenience, and through 
their uncle Aemilianus instituted a suit against him on the ground 
of his having bewitched their mother into marrying him. This 
serious charge, which was based principally on the disparity of 
years, Pudentilla being sixty (though her husband maintains she is 
only forty), Apuleius refutes in his Apologia,^ a valuable relic of 
the time, which well deserves to be read. The accusation had been 
divided into three parts, to each of which the orator replies. The 
first part or preamble had tried to excite odium against him by 
alleging his effeminacy in using dentifrice, in possessing a muTor, 

^ Such is Teuffel's opinion, following Biichelor, L. L. § 358. 
«P. 1414. 

^ This date is adopted by Charpentier. TeufTel (L. L. § 3C2, 2) inclines 
to ;i liter date, 125 A.D. 

"^ Apol. 23. * Sometimes called De Magia.. 



470 niSTOEY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

and in writing lascivious poems, and also hj alluding to his former 
poverty. His reply to this is ready enough; he admits that 
nature has favoured him with a handsome person of which he is 
not ashamed of trying to make the best ; besides, how do they 
know his mirror is not used for optical experiments? As to 
poverty, if he had been poor, he gloried in the fact j^ many great 
and virtuous men had been so too, and some thought poverty an 
essential part of virtue. The preamble disposed of, he proceeds to 
the more serious charge of magic. He has, so the indictment says, 
fascinated a child ; he has bought poisons ; he keeps something 
uncanny in his handkerchief, probably some token of sorcery ; he 
offers nocturnal sacrifices, vestiges of which of a suspicious charac- 
ter have been found ; and he worships a little skeleton he has 
made and which he always carries about with him. His answer 
to these charges is as follows : — the child was epileptic and died 
without his aid ; the poisons he has bought for purposes of natural 
science : the image he carries in his handkerchief is that of Plato's 
monarch (vo9? ySao-tXevs), devotion to which is only natural in a 
professed Platonist ; and as for the sacrifices, they are pious 
prayers, offered outside the town solely in order to profit by the 
peaceful inspirations which the country awakens. The third part 
of the indictment concerned his marriage. He has forced the lady's 
affections; he has used occult arts as her own letters show, to gain 
an influence over her ; love-letters have passed between them, 
which is a suspicious thing when the lady is sixty yeais of age ; 
the marriage was celebrated out of Oea ; and last but not least, he 
has got possession of her very considerable fortune. His answers are 
equally to the point here. So far from being unwilling to espouse 
him or needing any compulsion, the good lady with difficulty waited 
till her sons came of age, and then brooked no further delay; 
moreover he ha.d not pressed his suit, though her sons themselves 
had strongly wished him to do so ; as regards the correspondence, 
a son who reads his mother's private letters is hardly a witness to 
command confidence ; as regards her age she is forty, not sixty ; 
as regards the place of her marriage both of them preferred the 
country to the town ; and as regards the fortune, which he denies 
to be a rich one, the will provides that on her death it shall revert 
to her sons. Having now completed his argument he lets loose 
the flood-gatfts of his satire ; and with a violence, an indecency, 
and a dragging to light of home secrets, scarcely to be paralleled 

^ The word paupertaa must he usod in a limited sense, as it is by Horace, 

paiiperemque dives me petit ; or else we must su])pose that Apuleius had 
S'fa ludered liis fortune iu iits tijveis. 



I 



APULEIUS. 471 

except in some recent trials, he flays tlie reputation of uncle and 
nephews, and triumphantly appeals to the judge to give a verdict 
in his favour.! 

We next find him at Carthage where he gave public lectures on 
rhetoric. He had enough real ability joined with his affectation 
of wisdom to ensure his success in this sphere. Accordingly we 
find that he attained not only all the civil honours that the city 
had to bestow, but also the pontificate of Aesculapius, a position 
even more gratifying to his tastes. During his career as a 
rhetorician he wrote the Florida, which consists for the most 
part of selected passages from his public discourses. It is now 
divided into four books, but apparently at first had no such divi- 
sion. It embraces specimens of eloquence on all kinds of subjects, 
in a middle style between the comparatively natural one of his 
Apologia and the congeries of styles of all periods which his latest 
works present. In these morceaux, some of which are designed 
as themes for improvisation, he pretends to an acquaintance with 
the whole field of knowledge. As a consequence, it is obvious that 
his knowledge is nowhere very deep. He was equally fluent in 
Greek and Latin, and frequently passed from one language to the 
other at a moment's notice. 

He now cultivated that peculiar style which we see fully matured 
in his Metamorphoses. It is a mixture of poetical and prose 
diction, of archaisms and modernisms, of rare native and foreign 
terms, of solecisms, conceits, and quotations, which render it re- 
pulsive to the reader and betray the chaotic state of its creator's 
canons of taste. The story is copied from Lucian's Aovklos rj "Oi/og, 
but it is on a larger scale, and many insertions occur, such as 
adventures with bandits or magicians ; accounts of jugglers, priests 
of Cybele, and other vagrants ; details on the arts ; a description of 
an opera ; licentious stories ; and, above all, the pretty tale of Cupid 
and Psyche,2 which came originally from the East, but in its present 
form seems rather to be modelled on a Greek redaction. " The 
golden ass of Apuleius," as the eleven books of Metamorphoses 
are called by their admirers, was by no means thought so well of 
in antiquity as it is now. Macrobius espresses his wonder that 
a serious philosopher should have spent time on such trifles. St 
Augustine seems to think it possible the story may be a true one : 
" aut indicavit aut finxit." It is a fictitious autobiography, narrating 
the adventures of the author's youth ; how he was tried for the 
murder of three leather-bottles and condemned ; how he was vivified 
by an enchantress with whom he Avas in love ; how he wished to 

i-The case was tried before the Proconsul Claudius Maximua. 
2 U will be found JMetam. iv. 26— vi. 24. 



472 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 

follow her tlirougli the air as a hird, hut owing to a mistal^e of her 
maids was transformed into an ass ; how he met many strange ad- 
ventures in his search for the rose-leaves which alone could restore 
his lost human form. 1'he change of shape gave him many chances 
of observing men and women : among otiier incidents he is treated 
wdth disdain by his own horse and mule, and severely beaten by 
his groom. He hears his character openly defamed ; his resent- 
ment at this, and the frequent attempts he makes to assert his 
rationality, are among the most ludicrous parts of the book ; finally, 
after many adventures, he is restored to human shape by some 
priests of Isis or Osiris, to whose service he devotes himself for 
the rest of his life. 

Some have considered this extravagant story to be an allegory,^ 
others, again, a covert satire on the vices of his countrymen. This 
latter supposition we may at once discard. The former is not 
unlikely, though the exact explanation of it will be a matter of 
uncertainty. Perhaps the ass symbolizes sensuality; the rose-leaves, 
science ; the priests of Isis, either the Platonic philosophy, or the 
Mysteries ; the return to human shape, hohness or virtue. It is 
also possible that it may be a plea for paganism against the neAV 
religious elements that were gathering strength at Carthage ; but 
if so, it is hard to see why he should have chosen as his model the 
atheistic story of Lucian. In a similar manner the story of Cupid 
and Psyche has been made a type of the progress of the souL 
Apuleius was one of those minds not uncommon in a decaying 
civihzation, in which extreme quasi-rbligious exaltation alternates 
with impure hilarity. He is a licentious mystic ; a would-be 
magician; 2 a hierophant of pretentious sanctity, something between 
a Cagliostro and a Swedenborg ; a type altogether new in Eoman 
literature, and a gloomy index of its speedy fall. 

Besides these works of Apuleius, we possess some short philoso- 
phical tracts, embodying some of his Platonist and Pythagorean 
doctrines. They are De deo Socratis, De Dogmate Plafonis in three 
books, and the De Mitndo, a popular theologico-scientific exposition 
dra\\Ti from Aristotle. The general tenor of these works will be 
considered in the next chapter, as their bearing on the thought 
of the times gives them considerable importance. 

^ Apuleius himself (i. 1) calls it a Milesian tale (see App. to ch. 3). These 
are very generally condemned by the classical writers. But there is no doubt 
they were very largely read sub rosa. When Crassus was defeated in Parthia, 
the king Surenas is reported to have been greatly struck with the licentious 
novels which the Roman officers rend during the campaign. 

■'' 6t Augustine fully believed that he and Apollonius of Tyana were workers 
of (demon lacul) miracles. 



CHAPTER IX. 

State of Philosophical and Eeligious Thought DrniiNG the 
Peeiod of the Antonines — Conclusion. 

During the second century after Ckrist we have the remarkahle 
spectacle of the renaissance of Greek literature. The eloquence 
which had so long been silent now was heard again in Dio Chry- 
sostom, the delicate artillery of Attic wit was revived by Lucian, 
the dignity of sublime thought was upheld by Arrian and Marcus 
Aurelius. It should be remarked that the Greeks had never quite 
discontinued the art of eloquence. AVhen their own political in- 
dependence ended, they carried their talents into other lands, into 
Egypt, India, Asia Minor, soaring colonies of intelligence where- 
ever they went ; but the chief place to which they flocked was 
Home. At Eome the hold they gained was such that even 
tyranny itself could not loosen it. Their light spirits and plastic 
nature made them adapt themselves to every fashion without 
difficulty and without regret ; even under Tiberius or Domitian 
there was always something for a cultured Greek to do.^ 

Rhetoric was the inheritance of the dethroned Greek nation, 
and they clung to it with all the fondness of gratitude. Long 
after the pacification of the world had destroyed all the subject- 
matter of oratory, they cherished the form of it, and practised it 
with a zeal proportioned to its worthlessness. Even in her best 
days, as we know from Tlmcydides, Greece had been a victim to 
fine talking; the words of her delicious language seemed by their 
mere sound to have power over those that used them ; and now 
that patriotism had ceased to inspire her orators, they naturally 
sought in the splendour of the Asiatic style an equivalent for the 
chaste beauties of ancient national eloquence. Tliere were two classes 
of Greeks at this period who effected in no small degree the general 
spread of culture. These were the rhetors and the sophists ; pro- 

^ The reader is referred to Chompagny, Lcs Chars, vols, iii. cand iv ; Jlartlia, 
Les Moralistes romaincs ; Gastoii Boissier, Lcs Antonins ; Cliar[)cntiL'r, Kcri- 
vaiiis latins sous V Empire. 



474 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATUEE. 

perly speaking distinct, but often confounded under the general 
name of sophist. 

The rhetors proper have been already described. We need only 
notice here the gradually increasing insignificance of the themes 
they chose. In the Claudian era the points discussed were either 
historical, mythical, or legal. All had same reference, however 
distant, to actual pleading before a court of law. But now even 
this element of reality has disappeared. The poeticai leadings 
which had been the fashion under Domitian gave place to rfietOTical 
ostentations which were popular in proportion to their frivolity or 
misplaced ingenuity. The heroes of Marathon, ^ the sages of 
ancient Greece, had once been the objects of praise. Thay were 
now made the objects of derision and invective.^ Speeches 
against Socrates, Achilles, or Homer, and in favour of Busiris, 
were commonly delivered, in which every argument was acutely 
misapplied, and every established belief acutely combated. Pane- 
gyrics of cities, gods, or heroes, had been a favourite exercise of 
the orator's art. IS'oav these panegyrics were expended upon the 
most contemptible themes, infames materiae as they were called. 
Fronto sang the praises of idleness, of fever, of the vomit, of 
gout, of smoke, of dust ; Lucian, in a speech still extant, of the 
fly ; others of the ass, the mouse, the flea ! Such were the detest- 
able travesties into which Greek eloquence had sunk. Eoman 
statesmen frequently displayed their talents in this way ; but as a 
rule they declaimed in Greek. These orations were delivered in a 
basilica or theatre, and for two days previously criers ranged 
through the city, advertising the inhabitants of the lecturer's name 
and subject. 

Other aspirants to fame, gifted with less refinement, paraded 
the streets in rags and filth, and railed sardonically at all the 
world, mingling flattery of the crowd with abuse of the great, 
and of all the restrictions of society. These were the street 
preachers of cynicism, who found their trade by no means an 
unprofitable one. Often, after a few years of squalid abstinence 
and quack philosophy, they had picked up enough to enable them 
to shave their beards, don the robes of good society, and end their 
days in the vicious self-indulgence which was the original inspirer 
of their tirades. 

Every great city was full of these caterers for itching ears, the 
one sort fashionable, the other vulgar, but both equally acceptable 
to their audience. Some more ambitious spirits, of whom Apuleius 
is the type, not content wiMi success in a single town, moved from 

^ The declaimers of Suaseriae in praise of the heroes of old were contemp* 
tnously styled MapaeuvofMcixoi. ^ Delivered by Fronto. 



DIO CHRYSOSTOM. 475 

place to place, challenging tlie chief sophist in each city to enter 
the lists against them. If he declined the contest, his popularity- 
was at an end for ever. If he accepted it, the risk was enormous, 
lest a people tired of his eloquence might prefer the sound of a 
new voice, and thus force on him the humiliation of surrendering 
his crown and his titles to another. For in their delirious enthu- 
siasm the cities of Greece and Asia lavished money, honours, im- 
munities, and statues, upon the mountebank orators who pleased 
them. Emperors saluted them as equals ; the people chose them for 
ambassadors ; until their conceit rose to such a height as almost to 
pass the bounds of belief. ^ And their morals, it wiU readily be 
guessed, did not rise above their intellectual capacities. Instead 
of setting an example of virtue, they were below the average in 
licentiousness, avarice, and envy. Effeminate in mind, extrava- 
gant in purse, they are perhaps the most contemptible of aU those 
who have set themselves up as the instructors of mankind. 

But all were not equally debased. Side by side with this 
truckling to popular favour was a genuine attempt to preach the 
simple truths of morality and religion. For near a century it had 
been recognised that certain elements of philosophy should be 
given forth to the world. Even the Stoics, according to Lactantius,^ 
had declared that women and slaves were capable of philosophical 
pursuits. Apuleius, conspicuous in this department also, was a 
distinguished itinerant teacher of wisdom. Lucian at one time 
lectured in this way. Eut the most eloquent and natural of all 
was Dio Chrysostom, who, though a Greek, is so pleasing a type 
of the best popular morals of the time, that we may, perhaps, be 
excused for referring to him. He was a native of Eithynia, but 
in consequence of some disagreement with his countrymen, ho 
came to Eome during the reign of Domitian. Having offended 
the tyrant by his freedom of speech, he was compelled to flee for 
his life. For years he wandered through Greece and Macedonia 
in the guise of a beggar, doing menial work for his bread, but often 
asked to display his eloquence for the benefit of -those with whom 
he came in contact. Once while present at the Olympic festival and 
silently standing among the throng, he was recognised as one who 
could speak well, and compelled to harangue the assembled multi- 
tudes. He chose for his subject the praises of Jupiter Olympius, 
which he set forth with such majestic eloquence that all who heard 
him were deeply moved, and a profound silence, broken only by sobs 
of emotion, reigned throughout the vast crowd. Other stories are 

^ One, irritated that the Etnperor Antoninus diii not bow to liim iu the 
theatre, called out, " Caesar! do you not see me ?" 
2 Inst, 1)1 V. iii. 23. 



476 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITEEATURE. 

told showing tlie effect of liis words. On one occasion he recalled a 
body of soldiers to their allegiance; on another he quelled a sedition; 
on a third he rebuked the mob of Alexandria for its immoral 
conduct, and, strange as it may seem, was listened to without 
interruption. When Domitian's death allowed him to return to 
Eome, he maintained the same courageous attitude. Trajan often 
asked his advice, and he discoursed to him freely on the greatness 
of royalty and its duties. He seems to have held a lofty view of 
his mission ; he calls it a Trpo/jpT/o-t? tepa,i or holy proclamation, 
and he speaks of himself as a 7rpo(f)rjT7]<s aXrjOea-raTos ttjs aOavaTov 

What he taught, therefore, was a popular moral doctrine, based 
upon some of the simpler theories of philosophy, such as were 
easily intelligible to the unlearned, and admitted of rhetorical ampli- 
fication and illustration by mythology and anecdote. Considered in 
one way, this was a great step in advance from the total neglect of the 
people by the earlier teachers of virtue. It shows the more humane 
spirit which was slowly leavening the once proud and exclusive 
possessors of intellectual culture. By exciting a general interest 
in the great questions of our being, it paved the way for a readier 
reception of the Gospel among those classes to whom it was chiefly 
preached. But at the same time by its want of authority, depending 
as it did solely on the eloquence or benevolence of the individual 
sophist, it prevented the possibility of anything like a systematic 
amelioration of the people's character. This side of the question, 
however, is too wide to be more than alluded to here, and it is 
besides foreign to our present subject. We must turn to consider 
the state of cultured thought on matters philosophical and religious ; 
a point of great importance as bearing on the decline and speedy 
extinction of literary effort in Eome. 

To begin with philosophy. We have seen that Eome had 
gradually become a centre of free thought, as it had become a 
centre of vice and luxury. The prejudices against philosophy 
complained of by Cicero, and even by Seneca, had now almost 
vanished. Instead of being indifferent, men took to it so readily 
as to excite the fears of more than one emperor. ISTero had per- 
secuted philosophers ; Vespasian had removed them from Rome, 
Domitian from Italy. After Domitian's death, they returned with 
greater influence than ever. Hadrian and Antoninus were favour- 
able to them. Aurelius was himself one of their number. Philo- 
sophy had had its martyrs f and, after suffering, it had turned 

1 Dio. xvii. p. 464. 2 j^ ^ii. p. 397. 

'' I'^pictetus ( Dissert, iii. 26) uses the very word — &eov ^laicovoi koL 
u-prjpcs. Christiauity hallowed this term, as it did so many others. 



I 



GRADUAL UNION OF PHILOSOPHY AND RHETOEIC. 477 

towards proselytism. The provinces had emhraced it with enthu- 
siasm. The narrow prejudice which had envied their intellectual 
culture^ now envied their moral advancement; but equally without 
effect. Long before this, Musonius Eufus, an aristocratic Stoic, had 
admitted slaves to his lectures, ^ and at the risk of his life had 
preached peace to the armies of Vitellius and Vespasian.^ And 
this wide-spread movement had, as we have seen, been continued 
by men like Dio, and later still by Apuleius. 

But by thus gaining in width it lost greatly in depth. There 
is a danger when teaching becomes mainlj'" practical of its losing 
sight of the fundamental laws amid the multitude of details, and 
attaching itself to trifles. There is a superstition in philosophy 
as well as in religion. Epictetus gives directions for the trimming 
of the beard in a tone as serious as if he were speaking of the 
summu7n honum. And stoicism from the very hrst, by its absurd 
paradox that all faults are equal, obviously fell into this very snare, 
which, the moment it was popularized, could not fail with dis'* 
astrous effect to come to the surface. 

Again, the intrusive element of rhetoric greatly impeded strength 
of argument. In all practical teaching the point of the lesson is 
- known beforehand ; it is the manner of enforcing it that alone 
excites interest. Thus philosophy and rhetoric, which had hitherto 
been implacable foes, became reconciled in the furtherance of a 
common object. Seneca had affected to despise learning ; Gellius 
and Favorinus, on the contrary, delighted in its minutest subtleties. 
Philosophers now declaimed like rhetoricians, and indifferently in 
either language. But in proportion as they addressed a larger 
public, it became more necessary to use the Greek, which was now 
the language of the civilized world. Favorinus, Epictetus, M. 
Aurelius himself, all wrote and generally spoke in it. 

The reconciliation between philosophy and religion was not less 
remarkable than that between philosophy and rhetoric. It seemed 
as if all the separate domains of thought Avere gradually being fused 
into a kind of popular moral culture. The old philosophers had 
as a rule kept morals altogether distinct from religion. Epictetus 
and Aurelius make the two altogether identical. The old phik^- 
sophers had kept aAvay from the temples, or, if they went, had 
taken pains to mock the ceremonies tliey performed and to an- 
nounce that their conformity wae a pure matter of custom. The 
new philosophers were strictly regular in their religious worship, 
and not only observed and respected, but earnestly defended flie 

^ See Juvenal : Gallia causidioos docuit facunda Britannos De conducendo 
loquitur iam rhetoie Tliule, xv. 1112. 

^ Dissert, i. 9. ^ Xac. Hist. iii. 81. 



478 HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATUEE. 

entire popular cult. The nobler side of this " reconciliation " is 
shown in Plutarch, the grosser and more material side in Apuleius; 
but in both there is no mistaking its reality. Plutarch's idea of 
philosophy is "to attain a truer knowledge of God."^ Philo- 
stratus, when asked what wisdom was, replied, "the science of 
prayers and sacrifices."^ These men sought their knowledge of 
the Divine, not, as did Aristotle, in speculative thought, but in 
the collecting and explaining of legends. Stoicism had sought by 
compromise after compromise to satisfy the general craving for a 
religious philosophy reconcilable with the popular superstition. 
Its great exponents had stretched the elasticity of their system to 
the uttermost. They had given to their Supreme Being the namo 
of Jove, they had admitted all the other deities of the Pantheon as 
emanations or attributes of the Supreme, they had justified augury 
by their theory of fate, they had explained away all the inconsis- 
tencies and immoralities of the popular creed by an elaborate 
system of allegory ; but yet they had failed to content the religious 
masses, who divined as by an instinct the hollow and artificial 
character of this fabric of compromise. Hence there arose a new 
school more suited to the requirements of the time, Avhich gave 
itself out as Platonist. This new philosophy was anything but a 
genuine reproduction of the thought of the great Athenian. With 
some of his more popular and especially his oriental conceptions, 
it combined a mass of alien importations drawn from foreign cults, 
and in particular from Egypt. 

We read how Juvenal deplores the inroads of Eastern super- 
stition into Eome.^ Syria, Babylon, and Asia Minor had added 
their mysteries to the Eoman ceremonial. Astrologers were con- 
sulted by small and great ; the Galli c^^ eunuch-priests of Cybele 
were among the most influential bodies in Eome ; and the impure 
goddess Isis was universally worshipped.* Egypt, which in 
classic times had been held as the stronghold of bestial super- 
stition, was now spoken of as a " Holy Land," and " the temple 
of the universe." ^ The Stoics had studied in books, or by question- 
ing their own mind ; the Platonists sought for wisdom by travel- 
ling all over the world. Not content with the rites already 
known, they raked up obscure ceremonies and imported strange 
mysteries. Eefiection and dialectic were no longer sufficient to 
ensure knowledge ; asceticism, devotion, and initiation, were neces- 
sary for divine science. The idea broached by Plato in the 

1 Plut. Be Defect. Orac. p. 410. 2 yit. Apol. iv. 40. 

3 Jarripridem Synis in Tiberim defluxit Orontes, Juv. iii. 62. 
* Decernat qiiodcuiKjiie volet de corpore nostro Isis, Id. xiii. 93. 
6 Herui. 24. 



THE NEW PLATONISM. 479 

Timaeus of intermediate beings between the gods and man, 
seemed to meet their requirements ; and accordingly they at once 
adopted it. An entire hierarchy of Sai/xoves was imagined, and 
on this a system of quasi-religious philosophy was founded, of 
which Apuleius is the popular exponent. 

The main tenets of this, the last attempt to explain the mystery 
of the universe which gained currency in Eome, were as follows — 
it will be seen how completely it had passed from philosophy 
to theosophy: — The supreme being is one, eternal, absolute, in- 
describable, and incomprehensible; but may be envisaged by the 
soul for a moment like a flash of lightning.^ The great gods are 
of two kinds, visible, as the sun and stars, and invisible, as Jupiter 
and the rest ; both these are inaccessible to human communion. 
Then come the daemons in their order, and with these man holds 
intercourse. Plutarch had adopted a tentative and incomplete form 
of this doctrine, e.g. he denied the visibility of Socrate's daemon, 
and spoke of the death of Pan. But Apuleius is much more 
thorough-going : he supposes all the daemons to be at once im- 
mortal and visible. Each great god has a daemon or double, Avho 
loves to use his name ; and all the stories of the gods are in 
reality true of their daemons. In a moral point of view, daemons 
are of all characters — good and bad, cheerful and gloomy. ^ Their 
interventions, which are perpetual, explain what the stories could 
not explain, viz. the idea of Providence. In fact the whole 
current theory of the supernatural is easily explained when the 
existence of these intermediate beings is admitted. Aware that 
this theory wandered far from Eoman ideas, Apuleius tries to re- 
concile it with the national religion by calling the daemons genii, 
lares, and manes, which are true Italian conceptions. To a certain 
extent the device succeeded; at any rate the new philosophy resulted 
in making devotees of the higher classes, as superstition had long 
since done with the people. 

It seems incredible that any one who had studied the Platonic 
dialogues should have fancied theories like these to be their 
essence. Nevertheless, so it was. Men found in them what 
they wished to find, and perhaps no greater witness could be 
given to the immense fertility of Plato's thought. However, 
when these conceptions came to be imported into philosophy, it 
is clear that philosoj^hy no longer knew herself. She had be- 
come hopelessly unable to cope with the problems of actual life ; 
henceforth there was nothing left but the rigours of the ascetic or 

1 De ileo Socr. 3. 

2 E.g. Those of Greece are cheerful for the most part, those of Egypt 
gloomy. 



480 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

tlie ecstacy of tlie mystic. Into these still later paths we sliall not 
follow it. Apuleius is the last Eoman who, writing in the Lnl.in 
language, pretends to succeed to the line of thinkers of whom 
Varro, Cicero, and Seneca, were the chief. It is true he is im- 
measurably below them. In his effeminate union of licentious- 
ness and mysticism he is far removed from the masculine, if in- 
consistent, practical wisdom of Seneca, further still from the 
glowing patriotism and lofty aspirations of Cicero. Still as a 
type of his age, of that country which already exercised, and was 
soon to exercise in a far higher degree, an influence on the thought 
of the world,! he is weR worthy of attentive study. 

We may now, in conclusion, very shortly review the main 
features in the history of Roman literature from Ennius, its first 
conscious originator, until the close of the Antonine period. 

The end which Ennius had set before him was two-fold, to fami- 
liarise his countrymen with Greek culture, and to enlighten ihcir 
minds from error. And to this double object the great masters 
of Eoman literature remained always faithful. With more or 
less power and success, Terence, Lucilius, the tragedians, and 
even the mimists, elevated while they amused their popular 
audiences. In the last century of the Eepublic, literature still 
addressed, in the form of oratory, the great masses to whom scarce 
any other culture was accessible. Eut in poetry and philosopliy 
it had broken with them, and thus showed the first sign of with- 
drawal from that thoroughly national mission with which the old 
father of Latin poetry had set out. Yet this very exclusiveness Vv^as 
notwithout its use. It enabled the bestwriters to aim at a far higher 
ideal of perfection than would have been possible for a popular 
author, however scrupulously he might strive for excellence. It 
enabled the best minds to concentrate their efforts upon all that 
was most strictly national because most strictly aristocratic, and 
thus to form those great representative works of Eoman thought 
and style which are found in the vmtings of Cicero and Livy, 
and the poetry of Horace and Yirgil. The responsibility which 
the possession of culture involves was now acknowledged only 
within narrow limits. The motto, " pingui nil mihi cum populo," 
was strictly followed, and all the best literature addressed only to 
a select circle. Meanwihile the people, for whom tragedy and 
comedy had done something, however little, that was good, 
neglected by the literary world, debased by bribery and the 
coarse pleasures of conquest, suitk lower and lower until ttiey 
had become the brutal, sensual mob, inaccessible to all higher 
^ He was an African, it will be remembered. 



I 



EEYIEW OF EC MAN LITERATURE. 481 

influences, which satirists and philosophers paint in such 
hideous colours, but which they did nothing and wrote 
nothing to improve. Then came the era of the decline, in 
which, for the first time, we observe that literature has lost 
its supremacy. It is still cultivated with enthusiasm, and 
numbers many more votaries than it had ever done before; 
nevertheless, its influence is disputed, and with success, by 
other forces ; by tyranny in the first place, by a defiant philo- 
sophy which set itself against aesthetic culture in the second, and 
by revived and daily increasing superstition in the third. This is 
the beginning of the people's retaliation on those who should have 
enlightened them. In vain do emperors issue edicts for the sup- 
pression of foreign rites ; in vain do courtly satirists or fierce 
declaimers complain that Eome will not be satisfied with ancestral 
beliefs and ancestral virtues. The people are asserting themselves 
in the sphere of thought, as they had asserted themselves in the 
sphere of politics ages before. But the diff'erence between the 
two peoples was immense. The one had consisted of virtuors 
peasants and industrious tradesmen, working for generations to 
attain what they knew to be their right ; the other was formed 
of slaves, of freedmen, many of them foreigners, and others 
engaged in occupations by no means honourable; of all that motley 
multitude who lived on Caesar's rations and spent their days in 
idleness, in the circus, and in crime. Rotten in its highest circles, 
equally rotten in its lowest, society could no longer be regenerated 
by any of the forces then known to it. The national superstitions, 
out of which literature had at first emerged, were replaced by 
cosmopolitan superstitions of an infinitely worse kind, which 
threatened to engulf it at its close, and against which in the persons 
of such men as Seneca, Juvenal, and Tacitus, it strove for a while 
with convulsive vigour to make head. But these great spirits 
only arrested, they could not avert, the inevitable decay. Where 
public morals are corrupt, where national life is diseased, it is 
impossible that literature can show a healthy life. The despair 
that has taken possession of men's souls, which sheds a misan- 
thropic gloom over the writings of the elder Plinv aiiCi embitters 
even the noble mind of Tacitus, results from a conviction that 
things are incurably wi^ong, and from a feeling that there is no 
conceivable remedy. Men of feebler mould strive to forget them- 
selves in exciting pleasures, as Statins and Martial ; or in courtly 
society, as the younger Pliny ; or in fond study of the past, as 
Quintilian ; or in minute and pedantic erudition, as Aulus Gelliua. 
The literature of the Silver Age is throughout conscious of its 

2h 



482 HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 

pcwerlessness ; and this consciousness deadens it into tame acqui- 
escence or galls it into hysterical effort, according to the time and 
temperament of the author. . Pliny the younger and Quintilian 
alone show the happily-balanced disposition of the Golden Age ; 
hut what they gain in classic finish they lose in human interest. 
The decay of Greece had been insignificant, pretty but paltry ; the 
decay of Eome on the other hand is unlovely but colossal. Per- 
haps in native strength none of her earlier authors equal Juvenal 
and Tacitus ; none certainly exceed them. But they are the last 
barriers that stem the tide. After them the flood has already 
rushed in, and before long comes the collapse. In Suetonius and 
Plorus we already see the pioneers of a pigmy race ; in Gellius, 
Pronto, and Apuleius, they are present in all their uncouth dwarf- 
ishness. Meanwhile the clamours of the world for guidance grow 
louder and louder, and there is no one great enough or bold 
enough to respond to them. The good emperor would do so if he 
could ; but in his perplexity he looks this way and that, bringing 
into one focus all the cults and ceremonies of the known world, 
in the vain hope that by indiscriminate piety he may avert the 
calamities under which his empire groans. But nothing is of any 
avail. The barbarians without, the pestilence within, decimate 
his subjects, the hostile *;ods seem to mock his goodness, and the 
simple people who look up to him as their tutelary power wonder 
hopelessly why he cannot save them. And thus on all sides the 
incapacity of the world to right itself is made clearer and clearer. 
The gross darkness that had been once partly put to flight by the 
light of Greek genius when philosophy rose upon the world, and 
once again had been retarded by the heroic examples of Poman 
conduct and Poman wisdom, now closed murkily over the whole 
world. It was indeed time that a new order of thought should 
arise, which should recreate the dead matter and bring out of it a 
new and more enduring principle of life, which should give the 
past its meaning and the future its hope ; and, in especial, should 
reveal to literature its true end, the enlightenment and elevation, 
not of one class nor of one nation, but of every heart and every 
intellect that can be made to respond to its influence among all the 
nations of the earth. 



APPENDIX. 



A CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF ROMAN LITERATURE, 
FROM LiyiUS TO THE DEATH OF M. AURELIUS.i 



» 



33. C. 

'240 Livins "begins to exhibit. 

'239 Ennius born. 

'235 Naevius begins to exhibit. 

23i Cato born. 

225 Fabins Pictor served in the Gallic 

War. 
219 Pacuvius bora. 
218 Cincins Alimentus described the 

passage of Hannibal into 

Italy. 
217 Cato begins to be known. 
216 Fabius Pictor sent as ambassador 

to Delphi. 
207 The poem on the victory of Sena 

entrusted to Livius. 
204 Cato quaeator; brings Ennius to 

Rome. 
201 ITaevius dies (?). 
191 Cato military tribune. 
190 Cincius still writes. 
189 Ennius goes with Fulvius into 

Aetolia. 
185 Terence born.^ 
184 Cato censor. Plautus dies. 
179 Caeciliu^ flourished. 
173 Ennius wrote the twelfth book 

of the Annals. 



B.C. 

] 70 Accius born. 

169 Ennius dies. Cato's speech _pro 
lege Voconia. 

168 Caecilins dies. 

166 Terence's Andria. 

165 Terence's Hecyra. 

163 Terence's Hautontimorumcnos. 

161 Terence's Eunuchus and Fhor- 
mio. 

160 Terence's Adclplioe. 

159 Terence dies. 

154 Pacuvius fiourislied. 

151 Albinus, the consul, writes his- 
tory (Cell. xi. 8). 

150 Cato finishes the Origincs. 

149 Cato, aged 85, accuses Galba. 
Dies in the same year. C. 
Calpurnius Piso Frugi, the 
historian. 

148 Lucilius born. 

146 Cassius Hemina flourished. C. 
Fannius, the historian, serves 
at Carthage. 

142 Antonius, the orator, born. 

140 Crassus, the orator, born, Ac- 
cius, aged 3Uj Pacuvius, aged 
80, exhibit together. 



' From the Romhche Zeittafcln of Dr E. W. Fischer, and from Clinton, Fasti IJeUenict and 
Romani, Only those dates wiikh are tolerably ceitain are given. 
2 Cihilon places his birth in 195; but see Ttuff. § 97, C. 



L 



484 



HISTORY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 



B.C. 

134 Sempronius Assellio served at 
Numautia. Lucilius begins to 
write. 
123 Caelius Antipater flourished. 
119 Crassus accuses Carbo. 
116 Varro born. 
115 Hortensius born. 
Ill Crassus and Scaevola quaestors.^ 
109 Atticus born. 
107 Crassus tribune. 
106 Cicero born. 
103 The Tereus of Accius. Death of 

Turpilius. 
102 Furius Bibaculus horn at Cre-^ 

mona. 
100 Aelius Stilo. 
98 Antonius defends Aquillius. 
95 First public appearance of Hor- 
tensius. Lucretius born (?). 
92 Crassus censor. Opilius teaches 

rhetoric. 
91 Crassus dies. Pomponius flour- 
ished. 
90 Scaurus flourished. 
89 Cicero serves under the consul 

Pompeius. 
88 Cicero hears Philo and Molo at 
Rome. Rutilius resident at 
Mitylene. Plotius Callus first 
Latin teacher of Rhetoric. 
87 Antonius slain. Sisenna the 
historian, Catullus born (?). 
86 Sallust born. 

82 Varro of Atax born. Calvusborn. 

81 Cicero pro Quinctio. Valerius 

Cato Grammaticus. Otacilius, 

first freedman who attempts 

history. 

80 Pro Roscio. 

79 Cicero at Athens ; hears Anti- 

ochus and Zeno, 
78 Cicero hears Molo at Rhodes. 
77 Cicero returns to Rome. 
76 Asinius Pollio born (?). 
75 Cicero quaestor in Sicily. 
74 Cicero again in Rome. 
70 Bivinatio SLiidActio I. inVerrem. 

Virgil born. 
69 Cicero aedile. 

67 Varro wins a naval crown under 
Pompey in the Piratic War 
(Plin. iV ff. xvi. 4). 



B.a 

66 Cicero praetor. Pro lege ManiUa. 
Pro Cluentio. M. Antonius 
Gnipho flourished. 
65 Pro Cornelio. Horace born. 
Gi In toga Candida. 
63 Consular orations of Cicero. Pro 

Murena. 
62 Pro P. Sulla. 
61 Annaeus Seneca born. 
59 Livyborn(?). Aelius Tub'ero with 

Cicero in Asia. Pro A. Ther- 

m.o. Pro L. Flacco. 
58 Cicero goes into exile. 
57 Cicero recalled. Calidius agood 

speaker. 
56 Pro Sextio. In Vatinium. De 

Provinciis Consular ibus. 
55 In Oalpurnium Pisonem. Be 

Oratore. Virgil assumes the 

toga virilis. 
54 Pro Vatinio. Pro Scauro. De 

Ecpuhlica. 
52 Pro Milone. Lucretius, dies (?).2 
51 Cicero proconsul in Cilicia. 
50 Death of Hortensius. Sallust 

expelled from the senate. 
49 Cicero at Rome. Varro lieuten- 
ant of Pompey in Spain. 
48 Lenaeus satirizes Sallust. Cicero 

in Italy. 
47 Cicero at Brundisium . Hyginus 

brought to Rome by Caesar. 

Catullus still living (C. 52). 
46 The Brutus written. Calvus 

dies. Sallust praetor. Pro 

Mar cello. ' Pro Ligario. 
45 Cicero's Orator. Pro Beiotaro. 
44 The first four Philippics. Death 

of Caesar. 
43 The later Philippics. Death of 

Cicero. Birth of Ovid. 
42 Horace at Philippi. 
40 Cornelius Nepos flourished. Per- 
haps Hor. Sat. i. 2. Epod. xiii. 
39 Ateius Philologus born at Athens. 

Perhaps Virg. Eel. vi. viii. 

Hor. Od. ii. 7. Epod iv. 
38 Perhaps Eel. vii. Hor. Sat. i. 3. 
37 Varro (aet. 80) writes de PeRus- 

tica. Perh. Eel. x. Sat. i. 

5 and 6. Epod. v. 
36 Cornelius Severus(?) Hor. Sat. 1.8. 



> thers place this event in 109 B.C. * Others place this event in 55 b.c. 



APPENDIX. 



485 



B.O. 

60 Bavins dies. Hor. Sat. i. , 4, 
9, 10. 

34 Sallust dies. Sat. ii. 2. Epod. iii. 

33 Sat. ii. 3. Epod. xi. xiv. 

32 Atticus dies. Sat. ii. 4, 5. 
Epod. vii. 

31 Messala consul. Sat. ii. 6. 
Epod. i. and ix. 

30 Gallus ma{ie praefect of Egypt. 
Oassius Severus dies. TibuUus 
El. i. 3. The Georgics pub- 
lished. Hor. Sat. ii. 7, 8, and 
perhaps 1. Epod ii. 

29 Livy writing his first book. 
Propertius I. 6. 

28 Varro dies. 

27 Od. i. 35. Yitruvius writing 
his work. 

26 Gallus dies (aet. 40). Second 
book of Propertius pub- 
lished (?).i 

25 Livy's first book completed be- 
fore this year. Hor. Od. ii. 4. 

24 Quintil. Varus dies ( = the poet 
of Cremona, mentioned in the 
ninth Eclogue [?]). 

23 The first three books of the Odes 
published. 

22 Marcellus dies. Virgil reads the 
sixth Aeneid to Augustus and 
Li via. Third book of Pro- 
pertius (?) . 

21 Hor. writes Ep. i. 20 (aet 44). 

20 First book of JEpistles. 

19 Virgil dies at Brundisium. His 
epitaph : 
•• Mantua me genuit: Calabri rapuere: 
; tenet nunc 

Parthenope: cecini pascua rura duces." 
Tibullus dies. Domitius Mar- 
sus writes. 

18 Livy working at his fifty -ninth 
book. 

17 Porcius Latro. The Carmen 
Snccvlare. Varius and Tucca 
edit the Aeneid. 

16 AeinUius Macar of Verona dies. 
Od. iv. 9, to Lollius. 

15 Death of Propertius. Victories 
of Drusus. Od. iv. 4. 

14 The fourth book of the Oaes(? ). 

13 Cestius of Smyrna teaches rhe- j 
toric. 

* Or, perhaps, in 24 b.c. 



B.O. 

I i Death of Agrippa. 

II The Epistle to Augustus (Ep. 

ii. 1). 

10 Passienus and Hyginus Poly- 

histor. 
9 Ovid's Amores. 
8 Death of Horace. 
7 Birth of Seneca (?). 
6 Albucius Silo a professor of 

rhetoric. 

6 Tiro, Cicero's freedman, dies 

(aet. 100). 
4 Porcius Latro commits suicide. 

Ovid now in his fortieth year. 
2 Ovid's Art of Love. 
A.D. 

1 The Remedium Amoris. 

2 Velleius Paterculus serves under 

C. Caesar. 
4 PoUio dies. Velleius serves with 
Tiberius in Germany. 

7 Velleius quaestor. 

8 Verrius Flaccus, the grammarian, 

flourished. Ovid banished to 
Tonii, in December (Tr. 1, 
10, 3). 

" Authanc me gelidi tremerem cum mense 
De.cembris 
jScribentem mediis Adria vidita quis." 

9 The Ibis of Ovid. 

11 Death of Messala.' 

12 The Tristia finished. 

13 The Epistles from Pontus were 

being written. 

14 Death of Augustus, Velleius 

praetor. 

18 Death of Ovid at 60 ; of Livy 

at 76. Valerius Maximus ac- 
companied Sex. Pompeius to 
Asia. 

19 The elder Seneca writes his "re- 

collections." 

24 Cassius Severus in exile. Pliny 

the elder born (?). 

25 Death of Cremutius Cordus. 

Votienus banished. 

26 Haterius fiourished. 

30 Asinius Gallus imprisoned. 

31 Valerius Maximus wrote ix. 11, 

4 {extern. ), soon after the death 
of Sejanus. 
33 Death of Cassius Severus the 
* Jerome places it in 13 a.d. 



486 



HISTORY OV ROMAN LITERATURE. 



A.D. 

orator. His works proscribed. 
Death of Asinius G alius. 
34 Persius born. 

40 Lucan brought to Rome. 

41 Seneca's f?e /?•«. Exile of Seneca 

at the close of thi:i year. 

42 Asconius Pedianus flourished. 

43 Martial born. 

45 Domitius Afer flourished. 

48 Remniius Palaemon in vogue as 

a grammarian. 

49 Seneca recalled from exile, and 

made Nero's tutor. 

56 Seneca's cle dementia. 

57 Probus Berytius a celebrated 

grammarian. 
59 Death of Domitius Afer. 

61 Pliny the younger born (?). 

62 Death of Persius. Seneca in 

danger, Burrus being dead. 

63 The Naturales Qucuestiones of 

Seneca. 
65 Death of Seneca {Ann. xv. 60). 
QQ Martial comes to Rome. 

68 Quintilian accompanies Galba to 

Rome. Silius Italicus consul. 

69 Silius in Rome. 

75 The dialogue de Oratoribus, 
written (C. 17). 

77 Pliny's Natural History. Gabi- 
nianus, the rhetorician, flour- 
ished. 

79 Death of the elder Pliny. 

80 Pliny the younger beginsto plead . 



88 Suetonius now a young man. 

Tacitus praetor. 

89 Quintilian teaches at Rome. His 

professionalcareerextends over 
20 years. 
9 Philosophers banished. Pliny 
praetor. Sulpiciae Satira (if 
genuine). 

95 Statii Silv. iv. 1. The Thebaid 

was nearly finished. 

96 Pliny's accusation of Publicius 

Certus. 

97 Frontinus curator aquarum. Ta- 

citus consul suff"ectus. 

98 Trajan. 

99 The tenth book of Martial. 

Silius at Naples. 
100 Pliny and Tacitus accuse Marius 
Priscus. Pliny's panegyric. 

103 Pliny at his province of Bitliy nia. 

104 His letter about the Christians. 

Martial goes to liilbilis. 
109 Pliny (aet. 48) at the zenith of 

his fame. 
118 Juvenal wrote Satire xiii. this 

year. 
132 Salvius Julianus's Perpetual 

Edict. 
138 Death of Hadrian. 
143 Fronto consul suffcctus. 
164 Height of Fronto's fame. 
166 Fronto proposes to describe the 

Parthian war. 
180 Death of Marcus Aurelius. 



A large number of other dates will be found in the body of the work, 

especially for the later period ; but as they are not absolutely 

certain, they have not been inserted here. 



APPENDIX. 



487 



LIST OF EDITIONS EECOMMENDED.^ 



YOU THE EARLY PEEIOD." 



Wordsworth. Fragments and Spe- 
cimens of early Latin. 1874. 

Livius Androxicus. H. Diiiitzer. 
Berlin. 1835. 

Naevius. Eibbeck. Trag.Lat.Rel- 
liquiae, p. 5. 

Plautus. Piitschl or Fleckeisen. 
Unfinished. 

Ennius. Vahlen. Ennianae Foeseos 
Relliquiae. 

Pacuviijs. Eibbeck, as above. 

Terence. Wagner. Cambridge. 
1869. Text by Umpfenbach. 
1870. 

TuRPiLitrs. Fragments in Bothe 
{Poet. Seen. V. 2, p. 58-76), 
and Eibbeck's Comic. Lat. 
Relliq. 

The Early Historians. Peter (Fe- 
terum Historicorum Bomanorum 
Relliquiae. Lips. 1870). 

Cato. De Ee Eustica. Scrix>tores rei 
rusticae veteres Zatini, curante 



I. M. Gesnero. Lips. 1735 
Vol. 1. 

Cato Fragraenta praeter libros de Re 
Eustica. Jordan. Lips. 1860. 

The Old Orators to Hortknsius. 
H, Meyer. Oratorum Roman- 
07'um Fragmenta. Ziirieb. 1842. 

Accius. Tragedies. Fragments in 
Eibbeck, as above. 

Praeter Scenica, Lucian 

Miiller. LiLcilii Saturaran 
Relliquiae. Lips. 1872. 
Laclimann. 

Atta. Fragments. Botbe. Seen. 
Lat. V. 2, p. 97-102. Eibbeck. 

Afranius. Bothe, p. 156-9. Eib- 
beck. 

Ldcilius. Lucian Miiller, as above. 

SuEvius. Lucian ]\j tiller, as above. 

Atellanae. Fr. in Eibbeck. Com. 
Lat. Rel. p. 192. 

Auctor ad Herennium. Kayser. 
1854. 



FOR THE GOLDEIT AGE. 



Varro. Saturae Menippeae. Eiese. 

Lips. 1865. 
Antiquities. Fragments in 

E. Merkel. Lntroductiou to 

Ovid's Fasti. 

DeVitaPopuliEomani. Frag- 

ments in Kettner. Halle. 
1863. 

De Lingua Latina. C. 0. 

Miiller. Lips. 1833. 

De Ee Eusticn. Gesner, as 

above. See Cato. 
Cicero. Speeches. G. Long. Lon- 
don. 1862. In four volumes. 

Verrine Orations. Long, as 

above. Zumpt. Berlin. 
1831. 



Cicero. Pro Cluentio. Classen. 
Bonn. 1831. Ramsay. Claren- 
don Press. 

In Catilinam. Halm, Lips. 

Pro Plancio. E. Wunder. 

1S30. 

ProMurena. Zumpt. Berlin. 

1859. 

Pro Eoscio. Biichner. Lips. 

1835. 

• Pro Sestio. Plalm. Lips. 

1845. And Teubner edi- 
tion. 

Pro Milone. Orelli. Lips. 

1826. School edition by 
Purton. Cambridge. 1873. 

Second Philippic. With notes 



' The most convenient and accccssible are here recommended, not the most romplote or 
pThanstive. For these tlic reader is refeired to Teuffel's work, from which several of tlio»« 
hers mtDtioned are tak^n. 



488 



HISTOEY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 



from Halm, by J. E. B. 
Mayor. 
Cicero. Delnventione. Lindemann. 
Lips. 1829. 

De Oratore. Ellendt. Kon- 

igsberg. 1840. 

- Brutus. Ellendt. 1844. 

Pliilosopliical Writings. Or- 

elli. Vol. IV. 
De Finibus. Madvig. Co- 
penhagen. Second Edi- 
tion. 1871. F. G. Otto. 
1839. 

Academica (with. De Fin.). 

Orelli. Ziirich. 1827. 

• Tusculanae Disputationes 

(with Paradoxa). Orelli. 
1829. 

' De Natura Deorum. Scho- 

niann. Berlin. 1850. 

< De Senectute. Long. Lon- 
don. 1861. 

■ De Amicitia. Nauck. Ber- 

lin. ]867. 

De Officiis. 0. Heine. Ber- 

lin. 1857. 

■ De Republica. Heinrieh. 

Bonn. 1828. 

De Legibus. Vahlen. 1871. 

DoDivinatione. Gie^e. Lips. 

1829. 

Select Letters. Watson. Ox- 

ford. 
■' Entire Works. Orelli. Ziir. 

1845. Nobbe. Lips. 1828. 
Laberius. Ribbeck. Com. Lat. Rel- 

liqiiiae, p. 237. 
FueiubBibaculus. Weichert. Poet. 

Lat. Bell., p. 325. 
Syki Sententiae. Woelfflin. 1869. 
Caesar. Speeches. Meyer, Orat. 

Rom. Fragmenta. 

- Letters, l^ipperdey. Caesar, 

p. 766-599. 

■ Commeiitaries. Nipperdey. 

Lips. 1847-1856. 

■ Gallic War. Long. London. 

1859. 
Nepos. Nipperdey. Lips. 1849. 
School edition by 0. Browning. 
Lucretius. Munro. Cambridge. 

1866. 
Sallhst. AU his extant works. 
Gerlach. Basle. 1823-31. 



Varro Atacinus. Fragments in 

Riese, Sat. Menippeae. 
CiNNA. Weichert. Poetarum Lat. 

Vilae, p. 187. 
Catullus. R.Ellis. Oxford. 1867. 
Commentary. R. Ellis. Ox- 
ford. 1876. 
PoLLio. Fragments in Mej'^er. Orat, 

Rom. Fragmenta. 
Varius. Ribbeck's Tragic. Lat. Rel- 



1874. 
Lach- 



ViRGiL. Ribbeck. 4 vols. With an 
Appendix Virgiliana. Conington. 
3 vols. Oxford. A good school 
edition by Bryce. (Glasgow 
University Classics.) London. 

Horace. Orelli. Third edition, 
1850. 2 vols. School editions, 
by Macleane and Currie, both 
with good English Notes. Odes 
and Epodes, by Wickham. 

TiBULLUS and Propertius. 
mann. Berlin. 1829. 

TiBULLUS. Dissen. 

Propertius. Paley. 

Ovid. Entire Works. R. Merkel. 
Lips. 1851. 3 vols. 

: — Fasti. Paley. 

Heroides. Terpstra. 1829. 

Arthur Palmer. Longman. 
1874. 

Tristia and Ibis. Merkel. 

1837. 

Metamorphoses. Bach. 

1831-6. 2 vols. 

Gratius. Haupt. Lips. 1838. 
Including the Halieuticon, &c. 

Manilicjs. Scaliger. 1579. Bent- 
ley. 1739. Jacob. Berlin. 
1846. 

LivY. Drakenborg. 7 vols. Teubner 
text. Weissenbom, with an ex- 
cellent German Commentary. 

Book I. Professor Seeley. 

Cambridge. 

Justin (Trogus). Jeep. Lips. 1859. 

Verrius Flaccus. C. O. Miiller. 
Lips. 1839. 

ViTRUVius. Schneider. Lips. 1807. 
3 vols. Rose. 1867. 

Seneca (the elder). Keissling 
(Teubner series). Oratorum et 
Rhetorum sententiae divisiones 
colores. Bursjaij. 1857. 



APPENDIX. 



489 



THE PEKIOD OF THE DECLIKE. 



Germanictjs (translation of Aratus). 

Breysig. Berlin. 1867. 
Velleius. Kritz. Lips. 1840. Halm. 
Valerius Maximus. Kenipf. Berl. 

1854. 
Celsus. Daremberg. Lips. Teubner. 
Phaedrus. Orelli. Zur. 1831. 

Lucian Miiller. 1876. 
Seneca. Tragedies. Peiper and 

Kichter. Lips, 1867. 

Entire Works. Fr. Haase. 

3 vols. 1862-71. (Teubner.) 
■■ Natural es Quaestiones. Koe- 

ler. 1818. 
CuRTiTJS. Zumpt. Brunsw. 1849. 
Columella. In Gesner, Scriptores 

Rei Busticae. 
Mela. Parthey. Berl. 1867. 
Valerius Probus. In Keil Gramma- 

tici Laiini. Vol. I. 1857. 
Persius. Jahn. Lips. 1843. Con- 

ington. Oxford. 1869. 
LucAN. C. F. Weber. Lips. 1821. 

C. H. Weisse. Lips. 1835. 
Petronius. Biicheler. Berl. 1871. 

Second edition. 
Calpurnius. Glaeser. Gottingen. 

1842, 
Etna. Munro. Cambridge. 1867. 
Pliny. Sillig. Lips. 8 vols. 
- Chrestomatliia Pliniana, a 

useful text-book by Urlichs. 
Berlin. 1857. 
Valerius Flaccus. Lemaire. Paris. 

1824. Schenkl. 1871. 
SiLius. Ruperti. Gottingen. 1795. 
Statius. Silvae. Markland. Lips. 

1827. 

Entire works. Queck. 1854. 

Thebaid and Achilleid. Vol. 

I. 0. Muller. Lips. 1871. 
Martial. Schneidevin. 1842. 

Select Epigrams. Paley. 

London. 1875. 
Quint rn AN. Bonnell. (Teubner.) 

1861. • 



QuiNTiLTAN. Halm. 
Lexicon to. 



2 vols. 1869. 
by Bonnell. 



1834. 
Frontinus. Text by Dederich, in 

Teubner edition. 1855. 
Juvenal. Heinrich. Bonn. 1839. 

Mayor. London. 1872. Vol. I. 

(for schools). Otto lalm. 1868. 
Tacitus. Works. Orelli. 1846. Rit- 



ter. 1864. 

— Dialogue. 

1836. 

— Agiicola. 

1865, 

— Germania. 



Ritter. Bonn. 
Kritz. Berlin. 



Kritz. 
Latham. 



Berlin. 
London. 



1869. 
1851. 
Annales, Nipperdey. Ber- 
lin. 1864. 
Pliny the younger. Keil. Lips. 
1870. 

Letters. G. E. Gierig. 2 

vols. 1800-2. 

Letters and Panegyric. Gierig. 

1806. 
Suetonius. Roth. Teubner. 1858. 

Praeter Caesarum Libros. D. 

Reitferscheid. Lips. 1860. 
Florus. Jahn. Lips. 1856. 
Fronto. Niebuhr. BerL 1816. 
Supplement. 1832. S. A. 
Naber. (Teubner.) Ifi67. 
Pervigilium Veneris, Bugheler. 
1859. Riese's Anfrhologia Latina 
i. p. 144. 
Gellius. Hertz. Lips. 1853. 
Gaius. Lachmann. Berlin. 1842. 

Institutes. Poste. Oxf. 

1871. 
Apuleius. Hildebrand. Lips. 1842. 

2 vols. 
Itinerarium Antonini Augusti et 
HiEROsoLYMiTANUM. G. Par- 
they and M. Pinder. Berlin. 
1848. 



490 



HISTORY OF rOMAN LITERATURE. 



QUESTIONS OR SUBJECTS FOR ESSAYS SUGGESTED BY 
THE HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE.^ 



1. Trace the influence of conquest 

on Roman literature. 

2. Examine Niebulir's li3'potliesis 

of an old Eoman epos. 

3. Compare the Roman conception 

of law as manifested in an 
argument of Cicero, with that 
of the Athenians, as displayed 
in any of the great Attic 
orators. 

4. Trace the causes of the special 

devotion to poetry during the 
Augustan Age. 

5. The love of nature in Roman 

poetry. 

6. What were the Collegia poet- 

arum? In what connection are 
they mentioned ? 

7. "What methods of appraising 

literary work existed at Rome ? 
"Was there anything analogous 
to our review system ? If so, 
how did it differ at different 
epochs ? 

8. Sketch the development of the 

Mime, and account for its 
decline. 

9. Criticise the merits and defects 

of the various forms which 
historical composition as- 
sumed at Rome (Hegel, Fhi- 
los. of History, Preface). 

10. " Inveni lateritiavi : reliqui 

marmorcam'^ (Augustus), The 
material splendour of imperial 
Rome as affecting literary 
genius. (Contrast the Speech 
of Pericles. Thuc. ii. 37, sqq.) 

11. Varro dicit Musas Plautino 

sermone locuturas fuisse, si 
Latiitc loqui vellent (Qiiin- 
til. ). Can this encomium be 
justified ? If so, show how. 

12. ** Cetera quae vacuus tenuissent 

carmine mentes." Is the true 
end of poetry to occuj^y a 
vacant hour ? Illustrate by 
the chief Roman poets. 



13. The vitality of Greek mytho- 

logy in Latin and in modern 
poetry, 

14. State succinctly the debt of 

Roman thought, in all its 
branches, to Greece. 

15. What is the permanent contri- 

bution to human progress 
given by Latin literature ? 

16. Criticise Mommsen's remark, 

that the drama is, a'ter all, " 
the form of literature for 
which the Romans were best 
adapted, 

17. Form some estimate of the histo- 

rical value of the old an- 
nalists, 

18. What sources of information 

were at Livy's command in 
writing his history ? Did he 
rightly appreciate their rela- 
tive value ? 

19. What influence did the old Ro- 

man system have in repress- 
ing poetical ideas ? 

20. In what sense is it true that the 

intellectual progress of ? 
nation is measured by its 
prose writers ? 

21. Philosophy and poetry set be- 

fore themselves the same pro- 
blem. Illustrate from Roman 
literature, 

22. Account for the notable defici- 

ency in lyric inspiration 
among Roman poets. 

23. Compare the influence on thought 

and action of the elder and 
younger Cato. 

24. Examine the alleged incapacity 

of the Romans for speculative 
thought. 

25. Compare or contrast the Italic, 

the Etruscan, the Greek, and 
the Vedic religions, as bearing 
on thought and literature. 

26. Compare the circumstances of 

the diffusion of Greek and 



1 Some of these questions arc taken from the University Examinations, some also from 
Mr Gantillou's Classicul Examination Papers. 



APPENDIX. 



401 



Latin beyond the limits within 
■which they were originally 
spoken. 

27. Analyse the various influences 

under which the poetical 
vocabulary of Latin was 
formed. 

28, Give the rules of the Latin ac- 

cent, and show how it has 
affected Latin Prosody. Is 
there any reason for thinking 
that it was once subjected to 
different rules? 

25. *' Latin literature lacks origin- 
ality." How far is this criti- 
cism sound? 

80. Examine the influence of the 
Alexandrine poets upon the 
literature of the later Repub- 
lic, and of the Augustan Age. 

31. "What is the value of Horace as a 

literary critic ? 

32. Give a brief sketch of the various 

Roman writers on agricul- 
ture, 

S3. It has been remarked, that while 
every great Roman author 
expresses a hope of literary 
immortality, few, if any, of 
the great Greek authors men- 
tion it. How far is this 
difference suggestive of their 
respective national characters, 
and of radically distinct con- 
ceptions of art ? 

84. "What instances do we find in 
Latin literature of the novel 
or romance ? When and where 
did tbis style of composition 
first become common ? 

35. Trace accurately the rhythmical 

progress of the Latin hexa- 
meter, and indicate the prin- 
cjpal ditferences between the 
rhythm of Lucretius, Virgil, 
and Horace's epistles. 

36. Distinguish between the develop- 

ment and the corruption of a 
laugnage. Illustrate from Latin 
literature. 
37^ " Virfjilius amanfissimus vetusta- 
lis," Examine in all its bear- 
ings the antiquarian enthu- 
siasm of Virgil. 



38. " Verum orthographia quoqus 

consuetudini servit, idcoque 
scepe mutata est" (Qnintil.). 
What principles of spelling ^if 
any), a})pear to be adopted by 
the best modern editors ? 

39. Show that the letter v, in Latin, 

had sometimes the sound of 
w, sometimes that of h ; that 
the sounds o u, e i, i u, 
c q, were frequently inter- 
changed respectively. 

40. Examine the traces of a satiric 

tendency in Roman litera- 
ture, independent of professed 
satire. 

41. How far did the Angustan poets 

consciously modify the Greek 
metres they adopted ? 

42. Is it a sound criticism to call 

the Romans a nation of gram- 
marians ? Give a short account 
of the labours of any two of 
the great Roman gramma- 
rians, and estimate their 
value. 

43. Cicero {De Leg. i. 2, 5) says : 

" Abest Mstoria a Uteris nos- 
tris." Quintilian (x. i. 101) 
says : " Historia non cesserit 
Graecis." Criticise these 
statements. 

44. "0 dimidiate Menander.''' By 

whom said ? Of whom said ? 
Criticise. 

45. Examine and classify the various 

uses of the participles in 
Virgil. 

46. What are the chief peculiarities 

of the style of Tacitus ? 

47. "Roman history ended where 

it had begun, in biogra]thy." 
(Merivale). Account for the 
predominance of biography in 
Latin literature. 

48. The Greek schools of rhetoric in 

the Roman period. Examine 
their influence on the litera- 
ture of Rome, and on the in- 
tellectual progress of the 
Roman world. 

49. In what sense can Ennius rightly 

be called the father of Latin 
litei'ature ? 



492 



HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 



50. Can the same rules of quantity 

be applied to the Latin 
comedians as to the classical 
poets ? 

51. Mention any difFerences[in syntax 

between Plautus and the 
Augustan writers. 

52. Examine the chief defects of 

ancient criticism. 

53. The value of Cicero's letters 

from a historical and from a 
literary point of view. 

54. "What evidence with regard to 

Latin pronunciation can be 
gathered from the writings of 
Plautus and Terence ? 

55. Examine the nature of the chief 

problems involved in the 
settlement of the text of 
Lucretius. 

56. Compare the Homeric characters 

as they appear in Virgil with 
their originals in the Iliad and 
Odyssey, and with the same 
as treated by the Greek trage- 
dians. 

57. How far is it true that Latin is 

deficient in abstract terms ? 
What new coinages were 
made by Cicero ? 

58. Contrast Latin with Greek (illus- 

trating by any analogies that 
may occur to you in modern 
languages) as regards facility 
of composition. Did Latin 
vary in this respect at difier- 
ent periods ? 

59. "What are the main differences in 

Latin between the language 
and constructions of poetry 
and those of prose ? 

60. The use of tmesis, asyndeton, 

anacoluthon, aposioiJesis, Tiy- 
perbaton, hyperbole, litotes, in 
Latin oratory and poetry. 

61t "What traces are there of syste- 
matic division according to a 
number of lines in the poems 
of Catullus or any other Latin 
poet with whom you are 
familiar? (See EUis's Ca- 
■ tullus). 

62. Trace the history of the Atel- 
lanae, and account for their 



being superseded by the 
Mime. 

63. Examine the influence of the 

other Italian nationalities on 
Roman literature. 

64. "Which of the great periods of 

Greek literature had the most 
direct or lasting influence upon 
that of Rome? 

65. "What has been the influence of 

Cicero on modern literatui'e 
(1) as a philosophical and 
moral teacher ; (2) as a 
stylist ? 

66. Give some account of the Cicero- 

nianists. 

67. What influence did the study of 

Virgil exercise (1) on later 
Latin literature ; (2) on the 
Middle Ages ; (3) on the 
poetry of the eighteenth cen- 
tury ? 

68. Who have been the most suc- 

cessful modern writers of Latin 
elegiac verse ? 

69. Distinguish accurately between 

oratory and rhetoric. Discuss 
their relative predominance in 
Roman literature, and com- 
pare the latter in this respect 
with the literatures of Eng- 
land and France. 

70. Give a succinct analysis of any 

speech of Cicero with which 
you are familiar, and show the 
principles involved in its con- 
struction. 

71. Discuss the position and in- 

fluence of the Epicurean and 
Stoic philosophies in the last 
age of the Republic. 

72. State what plan and principle 

Livy lays down for himself in 
his History. Discuss and 
illustrate his merits as a 
historian, showing how far he 
performs what he promises. 

73. Give the political theory of Cicero 

as stated in his De Republica 
and De Legibus, and contrast 
it with either that of I'lato, 
Aristotle, Machiavel, or Sir 
Thomas More. 

74. Analyse the main argimient of 



APPENDIX. 



493 



t 



» 



the De Natura Deorum. Has 
this treatise a permanent 
philosophical value ? 

75. How far did the greatest writers 

of the Empire understand the 
conditions under which they 
lived, and the various forces 
that acted around them ? 

76. Examine the importance of the 

tragedies ascribed to Seneca in 
the history of European liter- 
ature. To whom else have 
they been ascribed ? 

77. How did the study of Greek 

literature at Rome affect the 
vocabulary and syntax of the 
Latin language ? 

78. The influence of patronage on 

literature. Consider chiefly 
with reference to Rome, but 
illustrate from other litera- 
tures. 

79. Are there indications that Ho- 

race set before him, as a sati- 
rist, the object of superseding 
Lucilius ? 

80. Compare the relation of Persius 

to Horace with that of Lucan 
to Virgil" 

81. Account for the imperfect suc- 

cess of Varro as an ety- 
mologist, and illustrate by 
examples. 

82. What is known of Nigidius 

Figulus, the Sextii, Valerius 
Soranus, and Apuleius as 
teachers of philosophic doc- 
trine ? 

83. Sketch the literary career of the 

poet Accius. 

84. "What were the main character- 

istics of the old Roman ora- 
tory? What classical autho- 
rities exist for its history ? 

85. Prove the assertion that juris- 

prudence was the only form 
of intellectual activity that 
Rome from first to last worked 
out in a thoroughly national 
manner. 

86. Compare the portrait of Tiberius 

as given by Tacitus, with any 
of the other great creations of 
the historic imagination. How 



far is it to be considered 

truthful ? 

87. At what time did abridgments 

begin to be used at Rome ? 
A;count for their popularity 
th'oughout the Middle Ages, 
an I mention some of the most 
imoortant that have come 
do vn to us. 

88. Whit remains of the writers on 

ap^jlied science do we possess ? 

89. Is it probable that the great 

divelopments of mathematical 
and physical science at Alex- 
andria had any general eff"ect 
upon the popular culture of 
tie Roman world? 

90. Wiiat are our chief authorities 

for the old Roman religion? 

91. A'l'count for the influence of 

Fronto, and give a list of his 
writings. 

92. Which are the most important 

of the public, and which ©f 
the private, orations of Cicero ? 
Give a short account of one of 
each class, with date, place, 
and circumstances of delivery. 
How were such speeches pre- 
served ? Had the Romans any 
system of reporting? 

93. A life of Silius Italicus with a 

short account of his poem. 

94. Who, in your opinion, are the 

nearest modern representa- 
tives of Horace, Lucilius, and 
Juvenal ? 

95. In what particulars do the 

alcaic and sapphic metres of 
Horace differ from their Greek 
models? What are the dif- 
ferent forms of the asclepiad 
metre in Horace ? Have any 
of the Horatian metres been 
used by other writers ? 

96. Enumerate the chief imitations 

of Ennius in Virgil, noting the 
alterations where such occur. 

97. Point out the main features of 

the Roman worship. (See 
index to Meri vale's Rome, s. v. 
Religion. ) 

98. Write a life of Maecenas, show- 

ing his position as ciiief minis- 



494 



HISTOEY OF EOMAN LITERATURE. 



ter of tlie Empire, and as tlie 
centre of literary society of 
Eome during the Augustan 
Age. 
99. Donaldson, in his Varronianus, 
argues that the French rather 
than the Italian represents the 
more perfect form of the 
original Latin. Test this 
view by a comparison of 
words in both languages with 
the Latin forms. 

100. Give a summary of the argu- 
ment in .any one of the fol- 
lowing works : — Cicero's De 
Finibus, Tusculan disjmta- 
tions, De Officiis, or the first 
and second books of Lucre- 
tius. 

lOL State the position and influence 
on thought and letters of the 
two Scipios, Laelius, and 
Cato the censor. 

102. Give Caesar's account of the 

religion of the Gauls, and 
compare it with the locus 
classiciis on the subject in 
Lucan (I. 447). What were the 
national deities of the Britons, 
and to which of the Eoman 
deities were they severally 
made to correspond ? 

103. Examine the chief differences 

between the Ciceronian and 
Post- Augustan syntax. 

104. Trace the influence of the study 

of comparative philology on 
Latin scholarship. 

105. *' Italy remained without na- 

tional poetry or art " (Momm- 
sen). In what sense can this 
assertion be justified? 

106. What passages can you collect 

from Virgil, Horace, Tacitus, 
and Juvenal, showing their 



beliefs on the gi'eat questions 
of })hilosophy and religion ? 

107. Examine the bearings of a 

highly-developed inflectional 
system like tliose of the Greek 
and Latin languages, upon 
the theory of prose composi- 
tion. 

108. To what periods of the life of 

Horace Avould you refer the 
composition of the Book of 
Epodes and the Books of 
Satires and Epistles? Con- 
firm your view by quotations. 

109. What is known of Suevius, 

Pompeius Trogus, Salvius 
Julianns, Gaius, and Celsus ? 

110. Who were the chief writers of 

encyclopgedias at Rome? 

111. How do you account for the 

short duration of the legiti- 
mate drama at Rome? 

112. Who were the greatest Latin 

scholars of the fifteenth and 
sixteenth centuries? In what 
department of scholarship did 
they mostly labour, and why? 

113. Enumerate the chief losses 

which Latin literature has 
sustained. 

114. Who were the original inhabi- 
'"■'^"tants of Italy? Give the 

main characteristics of the 
Italic family of languages. To 
which was it most nearly 
akin? 

115. Illustrate from Juvenal the 

relations between patron and 
client. 

116. Contrast briefly the life and 

occupations of an Athenian 
citizen in the time of Pericles 
and Plato, with those of a 
Roman in the age of Cicero 
and Augustus, 



N.B. — Many other q^uestions wiU be suggested by referring to the Index. 



INDEX. 



Accent, natural and metrical, 30, 32. 

Acrius, 65-67. 

Adlius, C, 90. 

Adhortationes of Augustus, 247. 

Aelius Stilo, 183. 

Aelius Tubero, Q., 158. 

Aemilius, spelling of decree of, 13. 

Aemilius Asper, 412. 

Aeneid, Virgil's, 264-275 ; its scope 



and object, 



sqq. 



Aeschylus of Cnidos, 161. 
Aesopus, the tiageJian, 212, 213. 
Aetna, the poem on, 372-374. 
Afranius, L., 55. 
African Latinity, 456 
Agraria Lex, spelling of, 13. 
Agricola of Tacitus, 451. 
AXria of Varro, 150. 
Albinovanus, Celsus, 296. 
Albinovanus, Pedo, 313. 
Albucius Silus, 319. 
Alexandria and its literature, 214- 

220. 
Alliteration, 238, 239. 
Amafiinius, 136. 
Ambivius Turpio, 49. 
A mores of Ovid, 306. 
Anipelius, L., 468. 
Amphitruo of Plautus, 44, 46. 
Annaeus Cornutus, 354, 355. 
Annales maximi, 88, 103. 

pontiticuin, 103; published 

by P. ^IuciusScaevola,129. 

publici, 103. 

Annals of Tacitus, 453. 

Anser, 251, 275. 

Anthology, 219. 

Antiochus the Academic, 161. 

Antonines, period of the, 436; phil- 

08oy)hy and rtli<^ioD under the, 473. 



Antonius, Julius, 296. 
Antonius, M., 118-123. 
aTrdeeia, 228. 
A].er, M., 410. 
Apion, 400. 

^AttokoXokvptwo-is of Seneca, 3 7. 
ApoUonius Rhodius, 219. 
air o(p 6 4y/j.aT a of Cato, 98. 
Apuleius, L., 469-472, 480. 
Aratus, 217-219. 
Arbiter, 119. 

Archaisms of Sisenna, 102; in Tibe- 
rius, 342; in Gellius, 466. 
Archias defended by Cicero, 165. 
Archimedes, 216. 
Archimimus, 239. 
Aristarchus, 216. 
Aristius Fuscus, 296. 
Arruntius Celsus, 467. 
Stella, 425. 



Ars Amoris of Ovid, 307. 

Ars Poetica, 295. 

Arval Brothers, Song of, 14. 

Asconius Pedianus, Q., 393. 

Asiatic style of -Oratory, 127, 181- 

320, 473. 
Assonance, 238, 239. 
Ateius, 157. 

Ateius Praetextatus, 158. 
Atellana, 29, 82-84, 208. 
Atilius, 55. 
Atta, T. Quintius, 55. 
Attic style of oratory, 127, 181. 
Atticus the friend of Cicero, Ibl. 
Aurelius, M., 463, 4G5. 
Augustine, St, on A'arro's Antiqai- 

tics Divine and Ilnvum, 147-149, 

on Varro gpuernllv, ]51. 
Augustus, 243; his Apotheosis, 245; 

his policy towards men of letters, 

247. 



496 



HISTORY OF ROM \N LITERATURE. 



B. 

Balbus, 195, 442. 

Ballad literature of Rome, its worth, 

26. 
Bassus, Aufidius, 349. 

Caeslus, 356. 

Bathyllus, 211. 

Berber, 15. 

Bibaculus, 230, 414. 

Borrowing of Roman poets from one 

another, 204. 
Brutus, 417. 
Bucco, 83. 



Caecilius, Statius, 48,49; and Ter- 
ence, story of, 49. 

Caecina, 158. 

Caelius, Antipater, IOC, 

Aurelianus, 463. 

Caesar, 188-193; relations with 
Varro, 142; his poetry, 213, 214; 
criticised by Quintilian, 416. 

Calidius, 185. 

Caligula, 352. 

Callimachus, 217-219. 

Calpurnius Flaccus, 463. 

Piso, 98, 99. 

Siculus, 371. 

Calvus, C. Licinius, 185, 231, 232. 

Camerinus, 313, 

Carbo, 112; the younger, 124. 

Carmen de moribus, of Cato, 98. 

Carmeu Saeculare, of Horace, 284. 

Carmina, 25, 35, 98. 

Cascellius, A., 158. 

Cassius Hemina, 98. 

Cato, 91-98;. disliked Eunius, 60; 
as an orator, 109, 110; hxz dicta. 



• Grammaticus, 158, 230. 

the Stoic, as described by 

Lucan, 364. 

Catullus, 232-238, 414; his influ- 
ence on Virgil, 253. 

Catulus, Q. Lutatius, 85, 117, 213. 

Cavea, 42. 

Celsus, A. Cornelius, 347, 417. 

Celtic language, its relation to the 
Italic, 10. 

Centum viri, 119. 

Cerinthus, 301. 

Cestius Pius, 320. 



Christianity, Seneca's relation to, 
385-390. 

Pliny's account of, 440. 



Cicero, M. TuUins, 159-185; criti- 
cises Ennius, 63; as a poet, 18i- 
186, 213; tempted to write his- 
tory, 187 ; criticised by Quintilian, 
415. 

Q., 159, 161 ; his poetry, 186. 

Cincius, L., Alimentus, 90. 

Cinna, C. Helvius, 231. 

Ciris, 311. 

Clamatores, 128. 

Classical composition in the imperial 
times, 3 

Claudius, 352 ; his changes in spell- 
ing, 11. 

Claudius Caecus, Appius, speech of, 
25, 34, 109; table of legis actiones 
attributed to him, 35. 

Clodius and Cicero, story of, 165, 
166. 

Clodius, Licinius, 100. 

Clodius Rufus, 410. 

Codrus or Cordus, 434. 

Coelius, 185. 

Collapse of letters on the death of 
Augustus, 341. 

Columella, 392, 393; quotes the 
Georgics, 261. 

Columna Rostra ta, spelling of, 12 ; 
words on, 17 ; its genuineness, 17. 

Comedy, Roman, 42-55. 

Commentaries of Caesar, 189-195. 

Commentarii Consulares, 88. 
Pontificum, 88. 



Consonants, doubling of, 11. 
Constitution, Livy's ignorance of 

growth of, 327. 
Contamination, meaning of, 45; 

used by Terence, 53. 
Controversiae of Seneca, 321. 
Conventionality of Virgil, 273. 
Copa, 257. 

Cornelius Cethegus, M., 109. 
Cornificius, 132. 
Cotta, C. Aurelius, 123. 

L., 110. 

Crassus, M. Licinius, 118-123. 
Cremutius Cordus, 349. 
Crepidata, 46. 
Culex, 257. 
Cunei, 42. 
Curio, 185. 



INDEX. 



497 



Carting, Quintiis, 392. 
Cynegetica, 313. 

D. 

T), sign of ablative, 10. 

Dates of Horace's works, 285. 

Declaimers, 319, 348, 463, 474. 

Delation, 438. 

Demosthenes and Cicero compared by 

Quintilian, 415. 
Dialects of early Italy, 9 ; of fifth 

and following centuries, 21, 22. 
Vide St, 11. 
Digest of Civil Law, by Q. Mucins 

Scaevola, 131. 
Dio Chrysostom, 475. 
Diomedes on the Roman satire, 78. 
Dionysius of Magnesia, 
Divinatio, 120. 
Doctus, of Pacuvius, 62, 414. 

. of Catullus, 234. 

Domitius Afer, 348, 416. 

. Corbulo, 392. 

Marsus, 299. 

Donatus, 252. 
Dossennus, 212. 

E. 

Eclogues of Virgil, 255, 259-261. 
Edictuni perpetuum, 119. 

tralaticium, 120. 

Elegy, Roman, 297. 

Elision in Ennius, 72. 

• in Virgil and other Augustan 

poets, 276. 
Eloq^uence, natural aptitude of the 

Romans for, 34. 
■ characteristics of ancient and 

modern, 105-8. 
Erapedocles, 222. 
Ennius, 58-62, 480 ; as an epic poet, 

68-74 ; as 'a writer of saturae, 75, 

76, 78 ; of epigrams, 84 ; criticised 

by Quintilian, 413. 
Enos, 14. 
Epic poetry, 68-74 ; founder of na- 

tional, 39 ; Virgil's aptitude for, 

265. 
Epicedion, 423. 
Epicurus, 223. 

Epigram at Rome, 84-86, 432. 
Epistles of Horace, 292. 
Epistolae amatoriae, 301. 
Epithalamia of Catullus, 236. 



I 



'EnvWia, 218. 

Eratosthenes, 216. 

Erotic elegy, 218. 

Etruria, its influence in origin of 
Latin Literature, 4 ; its language, 
10. 

Euclid, 216. 

Euphorion, 219. 

Euripides, the model of Roman tra- 
gedians, 57, 216. 

Excellences of Horace's Odes, 291. 

Exile of Ovid, 309. 

Exodium, 29. 

Extravagance of Lucan, 369. 

JEzum — esse, 11. 

F. 

F, in Oscan and Umbrian, 11. 
Fabius Cunctator, 109. 

Pictor, 89. 

Q. Maximus Servilianus, 98, 

Fabnla Atellana, 29 ; Milesia, 397. 

Faliscus, 313. 

Faunius, C, 100, 112, 441. 

Fasti, 325 ; of Ovid, 308. 

Favorinus, 463. 

Fenestella, 333. 

Fescenninae, 28 ; derivation of, 28 . 

late specimens of, 28. 
Figulus, C, a story of, 129. 
Flavins Caper, 442. 
Floras, 462. 
Julius, 296. 



Fortuna, the deitv of Lucan, 363 

Frontinus, 410-412. 

Fronto, 463-465. 

Fu, 14. 

Fulvius Nobilior, 98. 

Fulvius, Servius, 110. 

Fundanius, 296. 

Furius, 74. 

Fuscus Arellins, 319. 

G. 

Gains, the jurist, 466. 
Galba, Serv., Ill, 112. 
Gallus, Asinius, 348. 

Cornelius, 298. 

Sulpicius, 110. 

Gellius, 100 ; Aulus, 465, 466. 
Georgics of Virgil, 261-264. 
Germania of Tacitus, 45 
Germanicus, 349. 
Gracchi, era of, 118. 

2l 



498 



INDEX. 



Gracchus, Cains, 114. 

Tiberius, 113. 

Grammar, writers upon, 133, 134, 442. 

Grandiloquence of Roman tragedy, 58. 

Granius Liciniauus, 468. 

Gratius, 313. 

Gravitas, 34, 106. 

Greece, its influence over origin of 

Latin literature, 4; early relations 

with Rome, 4. 
Greek Literature, influence of, 1, 2, 

36 ; introduction of, to Rome, 36. 
Gromatics treated by Frontinus, 411. 



Hadrian, 456. 

Halieuticon of Ovid, 311. 

Haterius, Q., 319. 

Hebdomades of Varro, 150. 

Herennium, Auctor ad, 132. 

Heroides of Ovid, 306. 

Hesiod, the model of the Georgics, 

261. 
Hexameter of Ennius, 71-73. 
Hiatus in Ennius, 72. 
Hipparchus, 216. 
Hirtius, A., continuation of Caesar's 

Commenf.aries, 195. 
Historiae, 103. 

of Sallust, 202. 

Histories of Tacitus, 452. 

History, early writers of, 87-102 ; 

Roman treatment of, 324; 414, 

sources of, 325. 
Horace, 280-296 ; criticised by Quin- 

tilian, 414. 
Hortensius, 124-128. 
Hostius, 74. 
Huvianitas, 59. 
Humilitas, of Lucilius, 79. 
Hyginus, C. Julius, 333, 442. 

I. 

lapygians, 9 ; their language, 10. 

Ibis of Ovid, 311. 

Iccius, 296. 

iXapo-rpaywdia, 46, 144., 

Imagines of Varro, 150. 

Imitation of Virgil in Propertius, 

Ovid, and Manilius, 275. 
Imperative, full form of, 15. 
Improvisation, 424. 
Inanitas, 132. 
Xucurvicervicus 64, 



Italic laiiguages and dialects, 10, 

IraKiKT] Kca/u-ySia, 46. 

Italy, earliest inhabitants of, 9. 



Janitriees, 10. 

Javolenus Priscus, 441. 

Jerome, St, Life of Lucretius by, 

220, 221. 
borrows idea of Cburch bio- 
graphies from Suetonius, 458. 
Judices, 107. 

Selecti, 119. 

Julianus, Antonius, 463. 
Julius Africanus, Sex., 467. 

Secundus, 410, 417. 

Jurisprudence, philosophical, 462 

467. 
a branch of thought which 



the Romans worked out for them- 
selves, 35, 36. 

Jus augurale, 130. 

civile, 130. 

pontificum, 130. 

Justinus, 331, 462. 

Juvenal, 442-448 ; imitates Virgil, 
275 ; imitates Lucau, 448, n, 

Juveutius, 55. 

Celsus, 441. 



K. 

Kco/xcadoTpay^diai, 144, 



Laberius, D., 210. 

Laezius, 110, 111. 

Lampadio, Octavius, 133. 

Lanuvinus, 55. 

Largus, 313. 

Largus Licinus, 413. 

Lases, 14. 

Latin language, its exactness, 2; 

the best example of syntactical 

structure, 2 ; earliest remains of, 

9-21 ; alphabet, 11 ; pronunciation 

of, 12; spelling of, 12. 
Latin literature, influence of, 1, 2 ; 

origin of, 4 ; three periods of, 5 ; 

language difl'erent from popular 

language, 20 ; review of, 480 ; 

aristocratic, 480. 
Latin races, 9 ; characteristics of, 

23; religion of, 24; primitive 

culture of, 24. 



INDEX. 



499 



Lavinius, Luscins, 55. 

Law, early study of, 34, 35 ; writers 

on 129-131, 467. 
Law courts, Roman, 119. 
Legends connected with Virgil, 278, 

279. 
Lepidus, Aemilius, 112. 
Lesbia of Catullus, 233. 
Letters newly introduced by Claudius, 

11. 
Letters of Cicero, 181-184. 
Letter- writiijg, 181. 
Librarii, 27, 182. 
Library at Alexandria, 215 ; at Eome, 

142. 
Libri Pontificii, 104. 

Pontificum, 104, 

Praetorii, 88. 

Licinius Imbrex, 55. 

Mucianus, 410. 

Licinus Porcius, 85. 
Lingua Latina, 21, 

Romana, 21. 

Lintei Libri, 88, 325. 

Literary criticism of Horace, 295. 

Livius Andronicus, 37, 38 ; Avrites 

poem on victory of Sena, 38. 
Livy, 246, 322-331; criticised by 

Quintilian, 415. 
Locative case, 11. 
Logistorici of Varro, 146, 15fi. 
Lucan, 359-371 ; imitates "Virgil, 

275; criticised by Quintilian, 413; 

imitated by Juvenal, 448. 
Lucceius, 187. 

Lucilius, 78-81; criticised by Quin- 
tilian, 414. 

• Junior, 372. 

Lucretius, 220-230; criticised by 

Quintilian, 413^ 
Ludi Romani, 24. 
Lue, 14. 
Lupus, 313. 
Lycopbron, 220. 
Lyrical powers of Horace, 286. 

M 
Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, 

26. 
]\laccus, 83. 
Macer, 311. 
Macer, Aemilius, 251 ; criticised by 

Quintilian, 413^ 
' C. Licinius, 102. 



Maecenas, 244 ; the friend of Horace, 

281. 
]\ramercus Scaurus, 348. 
Mauiliau Irav advocated by Caesar, 
163. 

Speech of Cicero, ib. 

Manilius, 313-318; imitates Virgil, 

275. 
Mannar, 14. 
Marsians, 9. 
Jilartial, 429-433. 
Massa, 11. 

Materialism in Roman Poetry, 429. 
Matins, 74, 195, 211. 
Medea, 308. 

Medieaniiua Faciei of Ovid, 308. 
Medicine at Rome, 347. 
Memmius the friend of Lucretius-, 

221, 231. 
Menippeae Satnrae, 76 ; of Varro, 
144-146, 156. 

of iSeneca, 377. 

Menippus of Gadara, 144. 

of Stratonice, 161. 

Messala, 248, 319, 416. 

Messalinus, 319. 

Messapians, 9. 

Metamorf. hoses of Ovid, 308; of 

Apuleius, 471. 
Metre of Plautus, 48; of Roman 

satire, 76.; oi Cicero, 186; Satur- 

niau, 30, 31. 
ficTpioTrjs, 52. 
Milesian fable, 397, 472.1 
Milo defended by Cicero, 167. 
Mime, 29, 208-211, 239, 240, 434. 
Mimiambi, 211. 
Molo, 160, 161. 
Mommsen on Greek influence on 

origin of Roman literature, 4 ; on 

early inhabitants of Italy, 9. 
Montanus, 313. 
Monuments of early language, 

13-21, 
Moral aspect of the Aeneid, 272. 
l\Ioretum, 257 ; of Siievius, 67, 257. 
Mummius. 84. 
Munimius, Sj)., 112. 
Musonius Rufus, C, 359. 

Naevius, Cn., 38-40. 
Natural period in verse, 2^8. 
Natural History of Pliiiy, 343. 



I 



500 



INDEX. 



Kature, Lucretius's love of, 222 ; 

Virgil's, 263 ; Statius's, 424. 
Keoplatonism, 216. 
IJepos, Cornelius, 198-200. 
l^ero, 353 ; his contest with Lucan, 

360 ; account of his death, by 
' Suetonius, 460. 

Neronian literature, character of, 352. 
Nicander, 218. 
Nigidius Figulus, P., 158. 
Novius, 83.) 

0. 

O, shortening of, in Latin poetry, 

276, 277. 
Odes of Horace, 281-292. 
Offices of state held by Post- Augustan 

writers, 343. 
Oino, 12. 
Olympus, gods of, in Koman poetry, 

70, 71. 

6fXOlOT€\eVTOV, 239, 

Opici, 97. 

Oppius, 196. 

Oratory, Eoman, 105 ; in later times, 
438, 439 ; of Cicero criticised, 169- 
174 ; treated by Quintilian, 408 ; 
of Tacitus, 450 ; almost extinct, 
even under Augustus, 319. 

Orbilius Pupillus, 280. 

Orbius, P., 157. 

Origines of Cato, 93-95. 

Oscans, 9 ; their dialect, 10 ; alpha- 

. bet, 11 ; language used in atel- 

• lanae, 82. 

Osci Ludi, 29. 

Ostentationes, 426, 474^ 

pvid, 305-311 ; imitates Virgil, 275 ; 
criticised by Quintilian, 413. 



Pacuvius, 62-64 ; a writer of saturae, 

78. 

' Labeo, 157. 

Paedagogi, 280, 

Pagus, 252. 

Palliatse, 38, 46. 

Pallium, ^09. 

Panegyrics, 474. 

Pantomimi, 211. 

Papirius Fabianus, 384. 

Pappus, 83. 

Parallelism in Virgil, 277, 278. 



Parius, Julis, his abridgment of Va 
lerius Maximus, 346. 

Paronomasia, 239. 

Passienus Paulus, 441. 

Patavinitas of Livy, 330. 

Patriotic odes of Horace, 288. 

Patriotism of Virgil, 252, 274 ; of 
Horace, 288 ; of Juvenal, 446 j of 
Tacitus, 452. 

UeirXoypacpia of Varro, 150. 

Period, 101. 

Periodi of Pacuvius, 64. 

Persius, 355-359. 

Pervigilium Veneris, 468. 

Petronius Arbiter, 394-399. 

Phaedrus the Epicurean, 161. 

Phaedrus, 349-350. 

Philetas, 217-219. 

Philippics of Cicero, 184-186. 

Philodemus of Gadara, 136. 

Philosophers banished from Eome, 
134 ; part of a Koman establish- 
ment, 354. 

Philosophy, early writers upon, 134 ; 
relation of to the state religion, 
137 ; or Cicero, 174-179 ; Virgil's 
enthusiasm for, 253 ; in later times 
at .Rome, 476 ; united to rhetoric, 
477, and to religion, ib. 

Phoenician language in Plautus, 46. 

Fis, 10. 

Planipes, 209. 

Platonism of Apuleius, 478. 

Plautus, T. Maccius, 43-48 ; his Am- 
phitruo and Kw^wSorpoywSm, 144, 

Pleores, 14. 

Pliny the elder, 400-407. 

the younger, 437-442 ; on his 

uncle, 403. 

Plotinus, 216. 

Plotius, Crispinus, 334. 

Gallus, 132. 

Poet, early position of, 26. 

Foeta, 27. 

Poetical works of Cicero, 184-186. 

Poetry, before prose, 35 ; ancient, 
418. 

Pollio, Asinius, 246, 319, 416. 

Claudius, 441. 

Polybius at Rome, 134. 

Pompilius, 85. 

Pomponius the writer of Atellanae, 
83. 

Pomponius Mela, 394. 



INDEX. 



501 



I 



Pomponius Secutidus, 350, 361. 

Sextus, 462. 

Ponticus, 311. 

Pontificate, impersonated according to 

some in Aeneas, 272. 
Popular speech different from literary 

language, 20. 
Porcius Latro, 319. 
Postumius Albinus, 90. 
Poverty, affectation of, "by Augustan 

writers, 300. 
Praetexta, 38. 

Prayer, how treated by Persius, 357. 
Praetor Urbanus and Peregrinus, 119. 
Praevaricatio, 162. 
Priscus Neratius, 441. 
Probus, Valerius, 394. 
Pronunciation of Latin, 12. 
Propertius, 249, 302-305 ; took 

Philetas and Callimachus as 
. models, 218 ; imitated Virgil, 275. 
Proscaeuium, 42. 
Upoffudia, 32. 

Pseudo-tragoediae of Varro, 144. 
Pulpitum, 42. 
Pylades, 211. 
Pythagoreanism of Ennius, 60 ; of 

Figulus, 158 ; of the Sextii, 334. 

Q. 

Quadrati versus, 58. 

Quadrigarius, Claudius, 90, 101. 

Quaesitor, 120. 

Quaestio, 120. 

Quintilian, 407-410 ; upon Pacuviua, 

64 ; Ms account of the Roman 

authors, 413-417. 

R. 

p., sign of passive,' 10. . 

Eabirius, 136, 313. 

Recitations of works by authors, 425. 

Relation of Aeneid to preceding 

poetry, 273. 
Religio, 57. 

Religion, later Roman, 478. 
Religious aspect of the Aeneid, 269. 
Remedia Amoris of Ovid, 308. 
Remmius Palaemon, 348. 
Responsa Prudentium, 35, 247 ; of 

P. Mucins Scaevola, 129. 
•Reticence " of later writers about 

themselves, 487. 



Rhetoric, writers upon, 131-133 ; 

late Greek writers upon, 473 ; 

united with philosophy, 447. 
Rhetorical period in verse, 298. 
Rhetorical questions, treatment of, 

337. 
Rhetorical works of Cicero, 180, 181. 
Rhetoricians banished from Rome, 

134. 
Rhinthoniisa, 46, 144. 
Rhyme, beginnings of, 239. 
Rhythm of Tragedy, 58. 
Roman literature, date of beginning, 

27, 28. 
Romulus, a law of, 15. 
Roscius Sext. Amerinus, defended by 

Cicero, 160. 
Roscius, the comedian, 212, 213 j de- 
fended by Cicero, 161. 
Eue, 14. 
Rufus, 313. 

P. Suipicms, 123, 15T. 



Rutilius, 117. 
Lupus, 319. 



S. 

Sabinus, 312. 

Salian Hymns, fragments of, 15. 
Sallustius Crispus, C, 200-205. 
Salvius Julianus, 462. 
Liberalis, 441. 



Samnites, 9. 

Santra, 158. 

Satire, Roman, 75-81. 

Satires of Horace, 292 ; of Juvenal, 

444. 
Satura, 24, 29 ; account from Livy of, 

29 ; etymology of, 75. 
Saturnian metre, 30-33 ; scanning 

of, 30 ; laws of, according to 

Spengel, 31. 
Saturnius, 30. 
Scaena, 42. 
Scaevius Memor, 433. 
Scaevola attacked by Lucilius, 79, 

112. 
Scaevola, P. Mucins, 129. 

Q. Mucins, 130 ; the younger, 



131. 

Scaurus, Aemilius, 116.' 
School-books, 334. 
Scipio Aemilianus, 59 ; as an oratoi^ 
110-112. 



502 



INDEX. 



Scipio Afrieamis, friend of Eniiius, 
59 ; as an oratov, 110, 

Scipios, epitaphs in tombs of, 17. 18. 

Scope of Flavian poets, 419. 

Scriba, 27. 

Scribonius Lavgus, 393. 

Self praise of Koman orators, 115. 

Sempronins Asellio, 100. 

Senatus Cousultum de Bacchanalibus, 
18, 19. 

Seneca the elder, 320-322. 

one of his suasoriae, 335. 

Seneca the younger, tragedies, 374- 
377 ; as a prose writer, 378-391 ; 
as a philosopher, 382 ; in relation 
to Christianity, 385-390 ; his style, 
390, 391 ; criticised by Quintilian, 
417. 

Sensationalism of Lucan, 366. 

Sentcntiae, of Ennius, 64. 

Sergius Flavins, 334. 

Severus, Cornelius, 312 : criticised 
by Quintilian, 413. 

Sextius Pythngorens, 334, 

Sibylline books, 278. 

SiciW, influence of, 4, 27, 216, n. 

Siculus Flaccus, 442. 

Silius Italicus, 421, 422 ; imitates 
Virgil, 275. 

Silli, 76. 

Similes, in Ennins, 73 ; of Georgics 
reproduced in Aeneid, 259 ; of Vir- 
gil, Lucan, and Statins compared, 
435. 

Siparium, 239. 

Siro, 253. 

Sisenna, L. Cornelius, 101. 

Slaves, presence of at theatres, 42. 

Soccus, 209. 

Society as represented in Juvenal, 446. 

Sophists, 473. 

Sortes Virgilianae, 278. 

Spanish Latinity, 456. 

Spelling of Latin, 12 ; of Accius, QQ. 

Statins the elder,' 423. 

. the younger, 423-429 ; imi- 
tates Virgil, 275. 

Strabo, J. Caesar, 208. 

Suada( = n6t0ci), 109. 

Suasm-iae, Seneca's, 321 ; a specimen 
of, 335 ; as distinguished from 
Controversiae, 338. 

Suetonius, 456-462. 

buevius, 67, 257. 



Sulpicia, 301, 434. 
Sulpicius, 195. 

Sulpicius Apollinaris, C. 467. 
Syrus Publilius, 210, 211, 239, 2-10 ,' 
one of his fragments, 240. 



Tabernaria, 55, 208. 

Tabulae Censoriae, 88. 

Tacitus, 449-455 ; imitates Saliast 

203, 205. 
Tempe, 204. 
Terence, 49-54. 
Terentius Scaurus, 463. 
Tfcstamentum Porcelli, 397. 
Theatre, Roman, 41 ; according to 

Vitruvius, 41. 
Theocritus, 216. 
Thrasea, 355. 
Tiberius, 342. 
Tibullus, 299-302. 
Ticidas, 231. 
Tigellius, 212. 
Titinius, 55. 
Titius, 296. 
Tmesis in Ennius, 72. 
Togatae, 38, 46, 55, 208. 
Trabea, 55. 
Traheata, 47. 
Trachalus, 409-416. 
Tragedy, Eoman, character of, 56, 57 ; 

in imperial times, 351. 
Tragico-comoedia, 46. 
Traian, style of, 441. 
Trebatius, C, 157. 
Trogus, Porapeius, 331. 
Tubero, 205. 
TuUiola, 184. 

Tullius defended by Cicero, 161. 
Turnus, 433. 
Turpilius, 55. 
Tuticanus, 312. 
i Twelve Tables, laws of, 1 

U. 

IT, sound of, 10, 

Ulpius Marcellus, 467. 

Umbrians, 9; their dialect, 9, 10 1 

alphabet, 11. 
Urbanitas, 196. 



Valerius, 55. 
Aedituus, 85. 



INDEX. 



503 



Valerms Antias, 101. 

Cato, 230. 

Flaccus, 419-421. 

Maximus, 346. 

Soranus, 240. 

Valgiiis Rufus, C, 295. 

Vargnnteius, 133. 

Varms, Rufus, L., 250, 251. 

VaiTo, 141-156; criticised by Quin- 

tilian, 414. 
Ataciuus, 157, 231 ; criticised 

by Qniutilian, 413. 
Fates, 27. 

Velius Longus, 442. 
Velleius Paierculus, 344-346. 
Veunonins, 100. 
Verginius lioiuanus, 211. 

Rufus, 433. 

A'"erres impeached by Cicero, 161, 

162. 
Vorrius Flaccus, 333. 
Vcstricius Spurinna, 434. 
Vesuvius, eruption of, described by 

Pliny the younger, 402. 
Yictorius Marcellus, 412. 
Vidularia of Plautus lost, 44. 
Vipstanus Messala, 410. 
Virago, 272. 



Virgil, 252-279;^ imitates Ennius, 
62 ; alhides to Cicero's eloquence, 
164; his Aeneid edited by Varius, 
251 ; verses of Propertius upon, 
303, 304; criticised by Quintilian, 
413 ; his similes compared with 
those of Statius and Luean, 435 : 
imitated by Juvenal, 448. 

Virginius Flavus, 355. 

Vitellius, P., 348. 

Vitruvius, 241, 247, 331-333. 

Voconius Romauus 441. 

Volscians, 9. 

Volusius Maecianus, 467. 

Votienus Montanus, 348. 

Vowels, doubling of, 11. 

W 

Words, invention of, 47 ; Grec^k, in 
Plautus, 47 ; choice of, by Accius, 
65. 



Xenocles of Adraniyttium, 161. 



Zeno, 161; on the immortality of 

the soul, 478. 



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